Where You Lead, I Will Follow
by AndSoIWrite
Summary: "Right back in the thick of it, aren't you?" Crowley said quietly to Dean. "You've got a dead brother in your head, a family being held hostage, and your pet angel has turned feral. I'd get yourself under control before you fall apart, Dean Winchester. Because it won't be long." Companion to As Brothers We Will Stand. Also reads as a standalone. ON HIATUS.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: **It's here, the companion to As Brothers We Will Stand! If you haven't read ABWWS, don't worry, this fic isn't hard to follow; I suppose it could almost work as a standalone. But that wouldn't be as fun, would it? Anyway, some pre-reading necessities to get out of the way:  
1. This takes place about five years after the end of As Brothers We Will Stand.  
2. It does feature Dean's own family but I get rid of them pretty quick, so just hang in there for the first couple chapters while I set everything up. All three of the boys are coming, I promise.  
3. This is a story of Dean and Cas and yes, Sam. I just couldn't write one brother without the other. Kevin also lives in this 'verse. Also Season Nine never happened in this 'verse. For more background on that, I suggest you either read As Brothers We Will Stand or PM me and I can clear things up for you.  
4.** This is not and will never be a Destiel fic. **

Thanks to jojospn for letting me send her numerous emails about this story; y'all will see why I needed someone to bounce some ideas off of as things are about to get a little…mind-blowing…for Dean. Remember I said that.

I hope y'all enjoy and please let me know what you think!

* * *

"_Daddy!_"

The blood-curdling scream woke Dean with the same urgency as a fire alarm. He sat up, rubbing a hand across his face, digging himself out of a shallow sleep. Liz stirred next to him.

"I'll get her," his wife mumbled, rolling over.

"No," Dean said, legs already swinging over the edge of the bed. "I got it. Go back to sleep." She had to be up early for work in the morning and besides, it wasn't her name bouncing off the walls of the house.

"_Daddy!_"

The eight-year-old was pressed up against the headboard, covers pulled up to her chin, tears streaming down her cheeks.

"Hey," Dean said, flipping on the overhead light even though there was a lamp already shining on the bedside table.

"Daddy, you came," the little girl whimpered, reaching out and wrapping her arms around Dean's neck as he sat on the edge of the mattress.

"Of course I did," he said, pulling her into his lap. He had held Sam at this age, had comforted that child as this one, but Kayleigh was all skin and bones, small for her age in a way Sam never was. "I always come, don't I?" She nodded into his collarbone.

"What was it this time?" Dean asked and though another whimper escaped her lips, she pulled away, blinking up at him through wet eyelashes. He used the pad of his thumb to brush away the tears.

"A werewolf." Dean sighed, stroking her hair. It was long and always full of knots but no matter how many times he suggested they get it cut, Kayleigh refused. "Is that bad?" she said a moment later when Dean hadn't say anything.

"No," he said. "Not at all. I'm relieved."

"You are?"

"Yes. Because werewolves are very easy to keep away." Kayleigh looked relieved and loosened her grip a little. She always believed her daddy because he knew everything there was to know, especially about monsters.

"They are?"

"You bet. Here, let go for a minute. Get under the covers, there you go." Dean stood and scanned the room, looking for an object. When he found it lying across the toy shelf, he brought it over, twirling it in his fingers.

"A wand?" Kayleigh asked, confused. It was part of a dress-up costume she had gotten for last year's Halloween and had never seemed particularly useful except for sometimes hitting her older sister with when she was being mean.

"Not just any wand," Dean said. "This one is made out of silver."

"So?"

"Soooo," Dean said dramatically. "Silver is poison to werewolves. That werewolf is going to be so scared of this wand that he won't even come near the house again." He handed it to her and she held it as if it were a diamond ring.

"What about at school?" Dean pretended to think for a moment.

"Well, you can't bring it out in class but I bet if you keep it in your backpack for a couple days, the werewolf will leave you alone."

"That's a good plan," Kayleigh said, snuggling deeper into the blankets. "You're really smart, Daddy."

"Thanks," Dean said. "Do you think you can go back to sleep?" The little girl nodded sleepily, eyes already drifting shut, five fingers clenched around the plastic toy at her side.

"Daddy?" she said as he shut off the light.

"Yeah, honey?"

"How do you know so much about monsters?" Dean's insides froze for a second at the innocent question. Memories flashed in his mind. Blood, broken bones, blackened eyes leering up at him.

"I just do," he said after a pause.

"Did your Daddy teach you like you teach me?" Dean swallowed against the sudden lump in his throat. Recently, his youngest daughter had been curious about where her Daddy had come from and it was getting harder to dodge her questions.

"Something like that. Go to sleep."

He left her door open because along with monsters, Kayleigh was afraid of the dark. During the night, the little girl was pretty much frightened of everything. She constantly made up monsters that were coming after her. Real ones like werewolves and vampires and ghosts but sometimes they were just odd figments of her imagination, like the rabid unicorn that had attacked last week. Liz swore she was just going through a phase but it worried Dean. Worried him because he was _pretty_ sure the girl just had an overactive imagination but as with his life, he couldn't count on it one hundred percent. Maybe one night she would wake up and there would be a real live demon standing at the foot of her bed.

And that's why Dean got up every time she called for him

He couldn't get back to sleep and instead of waking Liz up with his restfulness, he headed for the kitchen. Out of habit, he checked the jug of holy water he kept tucked in the back of the liquor cabinet above the fridge. It was still there and still full. There was a bag of salt on the floor of the pantry, along with three more in the garage. Dean's guns were locked in a gun cabinet that was protected by bulletproof glass and a passcode.

Satisfied that the house was well-guarded and quiet, he poured himself a glass of whiskey even though it was two in the morning. He'd cut way down on his drinking since getting together with Liz but it was still alcohol that comforted him when his thoughts drifted toward that dangerous zone. Like the little girl asleep down the hall, his fears often come out with the night, though his weren't the kind that could be slayed with a silver wand.

"Dean?" His wife was standing in the doorway, wearing a tank top and shorts and leaning against the doorframe.

"Yeah," he said, giving her a half smile as she padded into the kitchen.

"What are you still doing up?"

"I was with Kayleigh for a little bit then couldn't get back to sleep. I'm fine."

"It's late," she mumbled, reaching for his hand. His fingers instinctively curled around hers.

"You should go back to bed," he said. "I'll be back in a while."

"Thinking about Sam again?" she murmured, squeezing his hand, eyeing the whiskey glass in front of them. She loved her husband but his nighttime habits were almost as disturbing as their daughter's. This happened at least once a week and that was only the times she woke to an empty bed. Who knew how many times it happened without her knowing.

Dean didn't have say anything; they both knew the answer.

"Do you want to talk?" she asked. They'd been together three years and married for one of those and Liz was still trying to piece together Dean's past. She knew limited details about the hunting and it didn't really bother her that he didn't like to talk about it; She understood that. And sometimes he talked. She knew that he had a little brother who had died a few years before they met, because even though Dean didn't like to bring up Sam, Liz had grown close with his wife, Kat. That's who Dean had been living with when she met him. Kat and Sam had a son, Parker, a little boy about Kayleigh's age.

Liz also knew that Dean had no living blood family, that his mother had died when he was very young and his father when Dean was in his twenties. Dean worshipped his mother but spoke sparingly about his father who had raised Dean and his brother on the road, making Dean and Sam kill monsters with him.

"What was Sam's favorite food when you guys were kids?"

Sometimes questions like these helped. It was a rare occasion that Dean started speaking first but he almost always answered when she asked.

"Lucky Charms," Dean said automatically, rolling the whiskey around in the glass before taking a sip, pursing his lips against the bitter taste. "Sammy really liked Lucky Charms."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." Dean smiled at some memory playing in his head. "He would even eat them for dinner."

"And what about you?" Liz asked, sneaking closer to him so that their hips and shoulders were pressed together. "What was your favorite food?" Dean flashed her the grin that made her insides melt every time.

"Hamburgers." She laughed out loud. Of course.

"Nothing's changed, huh?" she said, thinking of the barbeque last weekend where Dean had manned the grill for a good two hours.

"Nope," he answered but he couldn't but think how wrong she was. He was sitting in a house owned by him, with a woman married to him, and he hadn't killed anything in a good three or four years.

Everything had changed.

"Well, I'm going back to bed," she said. "I have to be up in less than four hours."

"Sorry I woke you," Dean said.

"I don't mind," she said and she didn't. It was strange and maybe disturbing but she had come to sort of appreciate the middle of the night rendezvous. It made her feel closer to Dean, like he wasn't trying to shut her out.

"You coming?" she asked and he shook his head.

"Not yet."

"Do you want me to stay?" Dean shook his head and she leaned down to kiss him on the cheek, smelling the whiskey on his lips.

"See you in the morning," he said and she left the kitchen, yawning as she went back to bed.

Dean finished his whiskey and washed the glass, his movements measured and well practiced. He did another walk through of the house but found nothing. When he stopped outside Kayleigh's room, he was pleased to see the little girl was fast asleep, hand still covering the wand. He had almost laughed earlier handing it to her, knowing that John would have – and probably did at some point – given eight-year-old Dean a loaded revolver if he ever claimed to be scared of the dark. Kayleigh didn't even fully understand the concept of a gun and that's the way it was going to stay.

Next he stopped at Rebecca's room and cracked the door. She was thirteen and the opposite of her quiet, reserved sister even though the two of them could have been twins if not for the height difference. Instead of a toy shelf (she had informed Dean last year she was too old for toys) he had built her a set of shelves that now displayed all her trophies. Even at a young age, she was a talented athlete, something Dean was ever proud of.

Neither one of the girls were biologically his, of course. They were Liz's daughters, born in a marriage that Liz said never should have happened in the first place.

"I made a mistake," she had told him on one of their first dates. "And then I thought I fell in love with that mistake and forget to see why it wasn't right in the first place." Dean didn't know anything about her ex-husband except that his name was Matt and Liz had stolen the girls away in the middle of the night, knowing he would never come looking for them. That's when she had passed through Kat's town, where Dean had been staying.

Dean had spent the time in between Sam's death and meeting Liz without much purpose. After a couple months, he had gotten his act together and applied for a job at a local garage, which filled his days but the nights were still difficult. He would sit at the kitchen table or on the living room couch or even on the back steps, Sam's dog, Bullet, at his side. Just sit, not sleep or read or watch TV. If he slept too long – more than an hour or two at a time – the dreams and memories dragged him under and it would take a while to shake off the feeling that his life was over. It wasn't over, he knew. It just felt like it, and sometimes that was even worse.

But now he had his girls, two human beings that relied on him to be there every day, to show up for dinner and family movie night and birthday parties. Looking after the girls wasn't exactly like looking after Sammy but it gave him a purpose again, a reason to do the best he could instead of just sitting in a corner trying not to be noticed.

Dean Winchester had turned into a family man.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: **Thanks for all the positive encouragement on the first chapter! I'm excited for y'all to read this story! Be sure to leave your thoughts!

* * *

Mornings were hectic. There were lunches to pack, breakfast to make, children to drag out of bed.

"Go away," Rebecca muttered into her pillow when Dean came into the room for the third time.

"I know you're awake," Dean said. "You're holding your phone under your pillow. Last time I came in it was on the nightstand." The teenager turned one murderous eye toward her stepfather.

"What is wrong with you?" she asked. "Were you in the FBI?" Dean just grinned and flipped the blanket off the bed in one smooth move. Rebecca shrieked at the cold air and curled into a small ball.

"Let's go before I have to get the pitcher of water."

"You wouldn't."

"Oh, I would," he assured her.

"Fine," she said, sitting up, pulling her phone into her lap.

"It's seven in the morning. Who could you possibly be talking to?" She glared up at him and he backed away with his arms up, heading one door down the hall.

"Hey there," he said in a much softer tone to the little girl beneath the blankets.

"Mmm." A tiny noise came from underneath the Disney princess comforter. He pulled it back as Kayleigh turned her head away from the light and Dean rubbed her back for a minute.

"Time to get up."

"Don't wanna."

"I know. Getting up sucks." Kayleigh turned wide brown eyes toward him.

"You're not supposed to say that word," she whispered. Dean pulled a serious face.

"Are you going to tell on me?" The little face went from astonished to indignant.

"I'm not a tattle-tale," she announced.

"Good," Dean said, standing up. "Let's go eat breakfast. I'm making pancakes." Kayleigh trotted after him and Dean stopped to bang once more on Rebecca's door.

"Wake up!" Kayleigh called. "Daddy's making pancakes."

"Get up or I'm taking the phone away," Dean ordered and a second later, the door was open. Rebecca's hair was more like a knot on top of her head but her fingers were curled around her phone.

"Smile," Dean said and she humored him, giving him a half-smile, half-glare before stalking to the kitchen. He sighed under his breath. He hated teenagers and it was only the first year of living with one.

"Dean's making pancakes," Rebecca was telling Liz as everyone gathered in the kitchen. Unlike Kayleigh, she was not on board with calling him Dad and Dean was okay with that. Rebecca had been ten when he started seeing Liz and she had twice as many memories of her real father than Kayleigh did. She respected Dean and acknowledged him as her father – her _step_father – but couldn't quite make the word come out of her mouth, not after calling another man that for almost a decade.

The girls slid onto stools by the counter as Liz set out placemats and silverware.

"Great," Liz said. "Put blueberries in mine please."

"Any other requests?" Dean asked, waving a spatula around as he turned on the stove and quickly mixed together the pancake batter.

"Plain," Rebecca said, head bowed to her phone.

"_Please_," Liz corrected.

"Plain _please_," said their older daughter.

"Dad, can I have chocolate chips?"

"Ask your mother."

"Mom, can I?"

"Just a few," she said, handing Dean the package of sweets. "Babe," she said to Kayleigh. "Why do you have your princess wand out at breakfast?" Dean glanced over his shoulder and sure enough the toy was lying on the counter just a few inches away from Kayleigh's fingers. She rolled her eyes.

"It's not a princess wand," she said. "It's a weapon." Liz raised her eyebrows and Dean concentrated on pouring chocolate chips into one of the pancakes.

"For what?" Rebecca wanted to know. "One of your made up monsters?"

"They're not made up!"

"Yes they are," Rebecca insisted, glancing up at her phone. "Vampires and Unicorns aren't real."

"Dad, tell her she's wrong. Monsters are real." Dean bit the inside of his cheek, catching Liz's stare from across the kitchen where she was getting juice out of the fridge. Her look warned him that if he confirmed what his daughter thought, he was going to be in big trouble. At the same time, Dean didn't want to outright lie to his daughter.

"Unicorns are definitely not real. Sorry kiddo," he said finally. "Here, eat up so you can get dressed. The bus is going to be here in forty-five minutes. You too," he told Rebecca. "And stop antagonizing your sister."

"I thought we agreed not to encourage her," Liz said to Dean after the girls went to put on school clothes. Dean was eating his own pancakes while Liz put the finishing touches on the girls' lunches.

"What do you want me to tell her?" Dean argued. "That it's fake? I'm not going to lie to her."

Liz sighed but said nothing and walked out of the room. Dean had told her before he proposed that there was something he had to tell her.

_"I have to tell you something and you might freak out," he had said. The two of them were on their way to a town a couple hours away for a weekend alone, or at least that's what Liz had thought. When they pulled up outside a concrete door in the middle of nowhere, she had grown nervous._

_"What is it?" she asked, peering out the window._

_"I wasn't always a mechanic," Dean said._

_"What were you?"_

_"It's kind of hard to explain," he said. "And you probably won't believe me."_

_"You weren't like a hit man, were you?" she asked, trying to think of the worst possible scenario. Dean winced._

_"Do you like horror movies?" he asked. Her eyes widened. _

_ "This is getting creepy," she told him. "Maybe we should go home." _

_ "Sorry, I've never had to do this before."_

_ "Do what?"_

_ "Tell a woman what I am. What I _was_." He took a deep breath. "Here's the deal, Liz. Monsters are real. Vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters…all of it is real. And I used to hunt them down." She stared at him as if it weren't Dean sitting in the driver seat but a stranger. _

_ "What did you take?" she said finally, leaning back against the seat._

_ "What? Nothing."_

_ "I won't be mad. Just tell me so we can get you help." Dean shook his head; this was going to ruin everything. He should have kept it a secret. But what if she had found out when they were married? He shifted in his seat and felt the jewelry box in his coat pocket move with him. With the way things were going, he wouldn't need it anymore._

_ "I'm not on anything. I'm telling you the truth. Come inside and let me show you."_

_ "Inside where?" Liz said, voice pitching upwards._

_ "My old home." She craned her neck again._

_ "You lived here? In the middle of the woods?"_

_ "Yeah," Dean said, opening the door and climbing out. He walked around the car and opened Liz's door, waiting for her to get out. She squinted up at him._

_ "You sure you aren't on anything?" He nodded and Liz got out of the car, following Dean to the concrete door._

_ He led her into a well-lit secret lair. That was her first impression. The place – the Bunker, she learned it was called – was huge and filled with both new and ancient technology._

_ "You lived here?" she asked, forgetting she had been upset outside._

_ "Yeah," Dean said. "Before…before Sam got sick." A few oak tables ran the length one the main room, books upon books against the walls._

_ "Is that a samurai sword?" she said, pointing to the blade hanging on the wall._

_ "Uh, yeah," Dean said, rubbing the back of his neck. He'd never brought a woman here, not even Kat. He himself hadn't been back in a while – maybe a year. Before he even met Liz. _

_ "Dean what's going on?" she said and her boyfriend motioned for her to follow him down another set of stairs, lowering themselves even further into the earth. She would have expected a place like this to be damp and cold and it wasn't. It smelled liked wood and was pleasantly warm, warm enough for her to shed her light sweater. Dean walked with purpose, obviously leading them somewhere. He stopped outside a heavy wooden door. _

_ "I don't know how else to prove it to you," he said, regret etched in his tone. _

_ "Prove what?" In answer, he swung the door open and flipped on the lights. It took a minute for Liz to take in what was in front of them. Weapons – hundreds of them – were lined on the walls, laid carefully across shelves and spread on the floor. Guns and knives and crossbows. Swords and flamethrowers. An entire table devoted to what looked like hand grenades was directly to her right. It was like stepping into a…horror movie._

_ "What is this?" she said and could not keep the tremble out of her voice._

_ "Proof," said Dean. "I'm a Hunter, Liz. I hunt monsters. It's what I was raised to do."_

_ "Is this some kind of joke?" she said. She wanted to run, turn around and slam the door in Dean's face and race to the car. She wanted to be as far away from this room as possible. Dean grabbed a leatherbound book off a shelf, flipping it open to reveal handwritten words scrawled across the pages._

_ "This was my dad's journal. He was a Hunter too."_

_ "This isn't real," Liz continued to deny. She shook her head, tears welling in her eyes. Dean brought his gaze to meet hers but instead of insanity in his expression, she saw pain and honesty. He looked like he was about to cry as well, which was odd because she had never even seen Dean tear up. She hardly ever saw him get sad._

_ "What can I do to make you understand?" he pleaded._

_ "I don't want to understand," she said, backing out of the room. Dean followed, making sure to close the door behind him. She felt better once all those weapons were out of sight but her heart was still racing, her mind still a scramble of disconnected thoughts._

_ Dean was lying._

_ But he looked so sincere._

_ No, it couldn't be true._

_ Monsters didn't exist._

_ Did they?_

_ "I just can't believe it," she said at last, shaking her head. "Take me home." _

_ Dean wanted to die. He had been on the fence about about telling Liz and this was exactly why. He had told the truth and now he was paying for it. He wished Sam was here so he could tell his brother I told you so. Now Dean was about to lose the only thing he had truly loved in years. His thumb brushed over the velvet of the jewelry box in his pocket._

_ "Okay," he said. "Let's go."_

_ Liz was silent on the way out; she seemed to be trying to get up the nerve to say something. Dean gave the bunker a last onceover, figuring he'd be back soon now that he was about to break off the last relationship he would ever try to have. Liz was standing at the car, looking down at the ground as if it might hold the answers she was looking for. Dean opened the door for her but she didn't get in, just kept staring. He kept quiet, knowing anything he had to say was just going to make things worse. _

_ He would miss Liz. He would miss the way she smiled before she kissed him, the way she braided her hair to one side when she was busy. He would miss waking up to her on the weekends, the sun peering through the bedroom window to cover her skin like a blanket. She was kind and gentle and even though she'd been through some heavy crap, she still hadn't lost some of that innocence Dean never had. _

_ "You know how I grew up in Nebraska?" she said suddenly, still watching the ground. She drew a circle in the dirt with the toe of her shoe._

_ "Yeah."_

_ "When I was little, I spent summers on my grandfather's ranch." Now she looked up at him and her eyes had turned into questions. "The summer I was seven, every single one of his cattle just keeled over and died. Over two hundred of them. No wounds, no poison. Nothing." Dean nodded._

_ "Was that…supernatural? Monsters?" Dean thought before he answered, knowing he only had so many words left with her and wanting to make them worth it. _

_ "Sounds like it," he said. "I've seen a lot of that type of thing."_

_ "Does it mean something?" Dean hesitated. He hadn't planned on telling her everything but she was asking so he might as well roll with it; she already had one foot out the door._

_ "It's a sign of demonic presence. Freak storms. Widespread crop failure. Dead cattle." Liz looked shaken. _

_ "No one could ever explain," she said. "But you just did." Dean shrugged._

_ "It's what I do. Did," he corrected. "Explaining the unexplainable."_

_ "Did your…did your brother hunt too?" Dean nodded. Liz knew very little about Sam. He had passed away a couple years ago after being sick and Dean now lived with Sam's wife and son._

_ "Yes," Dean said._

_ "Is that how he died?" she asked bluntly._

_ "No. Sam really did die of leukemia. He gave up hunting to have a family and get married." He failed to mention that Dean had ordered Sam to stop hunting after the younger Winchester had repeatedly gotten both of them injured on Hunts. But it had all worked out. Kind of. Sam had died happy and that was something not a lot of hunters could say._

_ "What about you?"_

_ "I hunted until I went to go live with Sam a few months before he died."_

_ "And you haven't since?" Dean swallowed. Garth had called about a year after Sam died begging for Dean's help on a case. Without knowing why, Dean said yes and the two of them took down a not-so-well hidden family of Rugarus. _

_ "Not in a few years," he said. "A buddy of mine needed help a while back."_

_ "Help killing something." It wasn't a question._

_ "Yes."_

_ "I can't even kill a wasp," Liz commented, sounding more curious than anything else._

_ "I know," Dean said, having killed many spiders that crawled into Liz's bathroom. "That's what I love about you." One eyebrow quirked up._

_ "You like that?" _

_ "Yes! You are so light and happy and you love life, Liz. And, more importantly, you showed me how to love life again. I would do anything to be with you and the girls. But I understand if this is too much for you." She crossed her arms over her chest and walked a few paces away from the car. Dean heard her let out a loud breath. She stayed turned away from him for a good three or four minutes and then faced him. _

_ "I love you, Dean. I never thought I would love anyone again. And you see me as 'light and happy' but I wasn't always this way. Just with you. Something about you makes me want to be grateful for being alive. I can't give that up, can't give you up."_

_ Dean was so ready for her to call the relationship off that it took him a minute to comprehend what she was saying. _

_ "What?" he said. He couldn't have heard right. Maybe he was seeing things, having delusions. She walked back over to him._

_ "I love you. I don't care what you did before I met you."_

_ "Liz. You don't know what I've done -."_

_ "Exactly," she interrupted. "And I don't want to know. Not all of it. Not even most of it." She cocked her head to one side, her hair spilling over one shoulder in a way that made her look twenty-five. "Let's start over from here. Can we do that?" Dean almost choked with relief. This was so much better than he expected. Ten minutes ago she had been ready to walk out but she hadn't. She was staying._

_ "Yes," he got out in a strangled voice. "Yes, of course."_

_ "Good," she said, tucking two fingers into his belt loops and bringing him close. "But please don't ever make me go in that dungeon room again."_

_ "Weapons room," he said against her lips as she kissed him. "The dungeon is -."_

_ "Ah," she said, pulling away. "Don't want to hear it. Starting over, remember?" The ring jostled in his pocket and he made the decision in the flash of a second. He pulled it out and got down on one knee, not even feeling the hard ground beneath him; he might as well have been floating._

_ "Speaking of starting over," he said as she looked down at him in shock. "Liz, I've made some terrible mistakes in the past, I've gotten into a lot of trouble, but through it all I've never met someone who makes me think I can forget all that. I need you. I love you. Will you marry me?"_

_Tomorrow, Liz was going to wake up and wonder what the hell her husband had been doing all those years. Five nights from now, she was going to dream about the dead cattle from thirty years ago. There would be hints of stories and folklore, explanations of the things that might be hiding under the bed and she would have so many questions. Some of them she would ask and some she would keep to herself._

_ But for right now right now, she only had one thing to say._

_ "Yes."_

Dean thought about that day as he drove to work. They spoke about each of their pasts sparingly with each other, not because it wasn't important, but because there was an unspoken agreement between them that the girls were the most important aspect of their lives and that meant looking forward. Liz was still trying to get them to move on from leaving their birth father, something Rebecca was having a harder time doing than her younger sister. Kayleigh reminded Dean of Sam as a child, fitting in easily in strange places, able to charm anyone with her dimpled smile. Rebecca on the other hand, Dean just couldn't figure out. He had tried giving her space but then Liz had accused him of not being involved enough and so Dean was walking a tightrope made of eggshells. Sooner or later something was going to give and he had a feeling it wasn't going to be a pretty aftermath. He might know how to gank a thousand different types of monsters but when it came to figuring out the minds of a thirteen-year-old girl, he was as lost as a city slicker at a tailgate party.

He pulled into work, thankful to have something solid and reliable to switch his focus to. He'd been working at this auto-shop for close to a year and it was as close to comfortable as he was going to get with a job even if the socket wrench didn't fit as adeptly into his palm as his pistol. At least cars weren't teenager girls, he mused. No emotions, or slamming doors, or stupid cellphones. Just oil and metal and belching exhaust pipes; even if they weren't neat, they were simple and these days, Dean enjoyed simplicity.

But it was his relaxed stride, the way he let out a whistle as he pulled on his blue jumpsuit and slid beneath an '88 Oldsmobile that might have been on it's way out if Dean hadn't started a love affair with it a few days ago that would be his undoing. Someone was watching him from two doors down, had been watching him through a set of ugly blinds for the last week and a half. The man wore an accountant's suit and a smile used to kill with kindness, stuck his hand out to greet his first customer as he craned to get one last calculating look at the ex-Hunter as he disappeared into the garage, oblivious he had a one-man audience.

Even that wouldn't have been so out of the ordinary because curiosity often got the better of people and if there was ever someone to be intrigued about, it was Dean Winchester. Except there was something off about the way this accountant stood, as if gravity was tilted at a different angle for him than the rest of the world and if Dean had been paying attention he would have seen what others could not. This man was not a man at all, not really.

His eyes were completely black.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: **_To my Russian-speaking readers_: As Brothers We Will Stand is now being translated into your language by the lovely happyviolence7 over on your fanfiction site. The link is in my profile if you're interested!

* * *

Dean walked in the door at five-thirty only to have a sobbing Kayleigh rush at his legs and wrap her arms around his waist.

"Don't make me go!" she wailed, burying her face in his shirt.

"What's going on?" Dean asked, looking around for his wife. Liz walked in from the kitchen looking stressed. She shook her head at their daughter.

"She doesn't want to go to piano lessons," Liz said.

"Again?" Dean asked, frowning. Since they enrolled Kayleigh in the music program a month ago, it had been tears every time. For some reason, the little girl got upset every time she had to go. Dean and Liz would have pulled her out of the program but Kayleigh always came back smiling at the end of the lessons. It was just getting there that was the problem and it was obvious from the look on Liz's face that she was losing patience this time around.

"Don't make me go!" Kayleigh cried again. Even though she was now eight and getting bigger, Dean picked her up and carried her to her bedroom.

"We're leaving in ten minutes," Liz warned him as he passed by and he nodded to signal that he heard. He shut the door of the bedroom and set Kayleigh on her bed. She sniffed loudly, pushing strands of hair out of her face.

"Why don't you want to go?" Dean asked, sitting next to her. She leaned into him and he felt her little body quake as she pulled in a shuddering breath.

"I just don't."

"You know that's not a good answer."

"I know. But I don't want to go."

"You had so much fun last time, remember? And you know Mom takes you out to dinner every time you go to a lesson. Don't you want that?"

"I want you to take me." Dean sighed.

"I can't take you everywhere," he said. "You have to let Mom do some stuff with you. It's not fair to her if she never sees you." She turned her big brown eyes up at him, tears still leaking down her cheeks, which were flushed from crying.

"But you have to be there to protect me."

"Kayleigh, listen to me," Dean said in a low, firm voice. "Nothing out there is going to get you, okay?" He paused then said, "There's no such thing as monsters." She shook her head in disbelief.

"Yes, there are. You're just saying that 'cause you're a grown up and I'm a kid." Dean switched tactics.

"Your mother can protect you just as well as I can." Kayleigh looked doubtful, pulling at the hem of her skirt.

"She's not as big as you." Dean laughed.

"But she's a lot smarter than me."

"Nuh-uh," Kayleigh said. "You're the smartest person in the whole wide world." Dean bent down and kissed her forehead.

"Thanks, but your Mom is plenty smart enough. You'll be fine." Her eyes wandered around the room as she thought it over.

"Can we get dessert after dinner?"

"You know that's not up to me. I'm staying here with your sister." Kayleigh got down from the bed and made a face.

"She's in a bad mood."

"You just worry about yourself," Dean said. "I'll deal with Rebecca." Kayleigh rubbed her palms over her face, clearing the tears away. She gave Dean a small smile.

"I guess I can go," she said, picking up the music book that was at the end of the bottom of the bed, half-open. Dean guessed it had been thrown there during the temper tantrum he had walked in on.

"That's my girl," he said. "I'm proud of you." She walked to the door of the room while Dean stayed on the bed, watching her leave. She was halfway out the door when she turned around, a serious expression on her face as she looked Dean dead in the eyes.

"You're wrong about something, Daddy," she said and Dean cocked his head.

"What's that?"

"Monsters are real. I've seen them." He was about to assure her that they absolutely weren't when she turned around and left, leaving Dean as speechless as he could get. Again, the nagging voice in the back of his head told him that she was just a little kid; she had no idea about the supernatural. But the conviction in her tone reminded him of those people he had saved back in the days, the ones who had seen something they would never forget. And he didn't like that. Not at all.

xxx

All Dean wanted to do once the two left was kick off his boots and watch the baseball game that was happening on TV. There was an unopened bottle of Scotch sitting in the liquor cabinet that was calling out to him. But instead, he knocked and pushed opened the door to Rebecca's bedroom. The teenager was lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling while headphones sprouted like veins from her ears. She hardly glanced at Dean when he walked in.

The two of them had a tricky relationship. They liked each other, even loved each other as a stepdaughter and stepfather should but things had been more difficult lately as Rebecca grew older and more wary about Dean. She was ever curious to know where he came from and because he wasn't about to tell her he spent his childhood with a gun in each hand, she grew irritated with him. Quickly.

"Hey," he said, standing next to her bed. She rolled her eyes to look at him, one hand still on her iPod.

"Hi."

"What are listening to?"

"Nothing."

"Must be good," Dean said sarcastically. Rebecca sighed and paused the music.

"What do you want?"

"Hey," Dean said, offended. "Let's be civil to each other, okay?"

"Fine."

"Are you hungry? What should I make for dinner?" She narrowed her eyes at him.

"I'm not hungry." Clearly something was up and Dean sat down on the bed while she scooted up the headboard, crossing her arms in front of her chest, mouth drawn in a straight line.

"What's up?" he prompted. "You're unusually snippy tonight." Instead of getting upset at the insult, Rebecca just looked away and bit her lip. When she did that, Dean could get a glimpse of the little girl she had once been. Before her world had been turned upside down. As cautious as she was around Dean, the ex-Hunter understood the girl's troubles better than she thought. He too had been the older child of a broken home and although Liz was the parent John had never been, he would bet this year's salary that Rebecca felt responsible for her little sister.

"You wouldn't be interested."

"Of course I'm interested. Is it school?" He watched her bite her lip harder.

"Kind of."

"Tell me," said Dean. "Then we can go make grilled cheeses."

"There's this project," Rebecca started. "And I can't do it. So I'm going to fail the class and everyone is going to think I'm dumb."

"You're not dumb," Dean said automatically. She wasn't. Even at thirteen, Rebecca was getting straight A's and was in all the honors classes that her small school supplied. She never asked for help when it came to homework and studying, something Dean was grateful for. She still didn't know he had never graduated.

"What's the project?" he said. "I could help." She rolled her eyes and sighed again.

"That's the problem. You _won't _help. Neither will Mom."

"Hey, I know we're not as smart as you," he teased. "But you can still ask."

"It's a family tree project," she said bluntly and that shut Dean up. She raised her eyebrows as if to say _I told you so. _"I'm supposed to research my ancestors, where I come from, all that."

"Yes, you should definitely ask your mother about that," Dean said, rubbing the back of his neck.

"I tried. She won't tell me. And there's no way I'm talking to my," she glanced at him, "my other dad. Therefore I'm going to fail." Her gaze turned hopeful and Dean wanted to crawl out of the room at the anticipation of the next question.

"Unless _you _help me," she said. But Dean was already shaking his head, standing up. Sam's face flashed to the front of his mind, eyes bright with laughter, and Dean's breath caught in his throat.

"Are you okay?" Rebecca asked, sitting up straighter. Dean nodded and took a step back.

"Told you you wouldn't help," she said bitterly but her expression was still concerned.

"I want to," Dean said at last. "But I can't."

"Why not? Is it because I'm not your real daughter? Is it because I don't call you Dad like Kayleigh? I know you're my father now. I get that."

"No," Dean whispered then cleared his throat. "It has nothing to do with any of that."

"If I was your real daughter, you would tell me," she insisted, watching him. Dean was trapped. He had to tell her something; he wanted to, but couldn't. Couldn't make his lips form those three names. He'd been so good for so long, here with his girls, and he was afraid that if he let the past in, he would fall apart. But how do you tell that to a thirteen-year-old girl who is still trying to figure out where Dean fit in her life?

"I know you had a brother," Rebecca said and Dean's heart fell. He didn't want to talk about Sam, not to this girl who was so much still a child. "He was married to Aunt Kat, wasn't he? You guys never told us that but I've heard you talking to Mom." Her words just kept coming, digging into Dean like a knife twisted into his chest.

"Sam died a few years ago," he said finally. "And to be honest, it's not something I talk about." Rebecca looked taken aback; of all the things her adolescent mind had concocted, this was not one of them. She had assumed that Dean's brother had been like her dad, a good-for-nothing drunk who had run out on his family at every convenient turn.

"What about your parents? Just tell me one thing," she pleaded. "You don't have to tell me about…Sam. Just one thing so I won't fail the class."

It was her wide eyes and pouting lips that did him in. The way she looked at him, full of innocence and sincerity. She really was still a little girl, not even close to the grown-up version of herself she liked to pretend to be. And she was sharing her life with Dean. He took her to swim practice and to the mall and one day he might even walk her down the aisle. He owed it to her to give her some part of himself, however small.

"Okay," he said, sitting back on the edge of the bed but not looking at her. He kept his gaze straight ahead.

"Really?" Rebecca said, scrambling off the bed and grabbing a notebook and pen as if she didn't believe he would stay.

"Yeah. I'll tell you some things. But when I'm done talking, I'm done, okay?" She nodded, readying her pen.

"My mom, Mary, was real pretty," he started. At least with Mary it was easier to talk about her in the past tense; he'd been doing it almost his whole life. "She was blonde and had these gorgeous green eyes."

"Like yours," Rebecca interrupted and Dean cocked his head in her direction, startled at the observation.

"Yeah," he said. "I guess like mine. Anyway, she used to tuck me into bed every night and she let me sleep with my toys in my bed so I wouldn't be scared of the monsters under the bed."

"Is she still alive?" Rebecca asked even though she had already guessed the answer. Dean shook his head.

"No. She died when I was little. There was a fire."

"That's awful," Rebecca said. She had no idea Dean had been through all this. He seemed like such an easy-going guy, quick to smile, quick to make the rest of the family laugh with his jokes and cheesy sense of humor.

"It was," Dean said, tongue darting out to wet his lips as if he could taste the smoke from all those years ago. "So my Dad raised me."

"What was his name?"

"John. John Winchester." He watched her scribble that name in bubbly letters that filled up two lines of the paper. Above that she had written Mary and drawn an arrow between the two names.

"Was your dad like you?" Dean didn't know in what way she meant the question but he shook his head all the same.

"My father loved me but after my Mom died he…got depressed."

"He never got married again?" Dean almost snorted at the idea.

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. I think he loved my mom too much. He just couldn't love anyone else." Rebecca was quiet, staring down at the two names she had written. At the top of the page were the four names of her family: Mom, Rebecca, Kayleigh, and then Dean.

"Dean, can I ask a question about you and Mom?" Even though she had never asked that before, Dean found himself nodding.

"Sure."

"How can you fall in love with more than one person? I thought that you met one person for your whole life and that was it. Like your mom and dad. But I think Mom really loves you. But I know she loved my other dad too sometimes. I don't get it." Dean thought carefully before answering; it had taken a long time for Rebecca to become long enough to confide something like this to him and he didn't want to screw it up.

"People can fall out of love, Rebecca. You grow up and grow apart and realize that you don't want the same things anymore. Your mom and dad just didn't value the same things anymore."

"That's sad," she commented, face screwed up in concentration as she took it all in. "Then how do you know if you'll fall out of love? What if you and Mom fall out of love and you leave?" Now Dean understood better where this was going. He turned towards the young girl, careful to keep his voice steady and assuring.

"I'm not going to leave," he said. "I love your mother very much. Sometimes, I love her so much it hurts." Her eyes widened and he smiled. "Someday, if you're lucky, you might know what I mean."

"There's something I have to tell you," she said. "But you have to promise not to tell Mom." Dean hesitated.

"If it's something serious, I have to tell your mother, Rebecca. You know that. We don't keep secrets from each other."

"It's not bad," she assured him, the notebook abandoned beside her. She wouldn't meet his eyes, staring instead at the quilt on her bed, picking at a loose thread. "Not like that."

"You can tell me anything," Dean said. "Even if we have to tell your mother something, I'll always make sure to help you figure it out." Rebecca took a deep breath.

"I like you," she said and Dean thought he saw a glimmer of tears in her eyes. "A lot. I think I might like you more than my other dad. Is that wrong?" Dean wanted to pull his stepdaughter into his arms and hold her tight but he stayed where he was. He had a feeling this had probably been bothering Rebecca for a while by the nervous way she kept averting her eyes from him.

"No, sweetheart. It's not wrong. You can love people in different ways. You might love your other Dad because he was there first and you guys had some good times together. But you might also love me because I'm here now and I'm going to be here for the rest of your life. Your other father and I are very different kind of guys, I want you to know that. I will never hurt you or your sister or your mother." Rebecca's head snapped up and all nervousness was gone from her expression as she looked him straight in the eye.

"Even if you get mad?" Dean recognized himself in the fierceness of her tone, the deep, probing look in her gaze.

"Especially if I get mad," Dean promised. "It's never okay to hurt someone else because of what you're feeling." Rebecca leaned back against her pillows.

"I don't think I'll fail now," she announced, closing the notebook and setting it on the table next to her bed. She was careful to cap the pen so it didn't bleed on her blanket.

"Atta girl," Dean said. "Now can we go make dinner?"

"I guess," she said but Dean thought she looked a little happier as the two of them made their way into the kitchen.

"Let me guess, you want pickles and spinach on your sandwich?" he teased, pulling ingredients out of the fridge as Rebecca got out two plates and glasses.

"Ew, no. That's so gross."

"Hey don't knock it til you try it." She cocked her head and failed at her usual smart-alec retort.

"You okay?" Dean asked.

"What you just said reminded me of something," she said, guilt tracing her features. She pulled her long hair into a ponytail only to find she didn't have a hair tie and let it fall back over her shoulders. It was something she had picked up from her mother, Dean noticed; Liz did the same exact thing.

"What is it?"

"Someone knocked on our door today. Some strange guy."

Dean whipped around, a piece of bread in each hand but he was careful to keep his voice calm.

"Were they selling something?" Rebecca shook her head and folded two napkins into triangles, tucking them beside the plates.

"No, but he asked for you though."

"Did he leave a name?" Dean asked. He didn't know many people in this town. He had been over at the garage most of the day so it couldn't have been one of the guys form there and Rebecca would have recognized one of the neighbors. Panic gripped Dean like a vise.

"I'm trying to remember. He was really weird though, Dean."

"Weird how?" Rebecca shrugged and sat at the counter, watching him. She raised her eyebrows, looking past him.

"I think you're burning dinner."

"Shit," Dean said, turning back to the smoking sandwiches and waving a towel to clear the air. "Uh, don't tell your mother I said that." He could practically feel her smirking behind his back.

"I won't."

Dean placed both palms on the counter and leaned over it with hunched shoulders. There was definitely someone coming after him and he had no way of knowing who – or what – it was. He had to get by himself and make some phone calls. He categorized them in his head. First Kevin to make sure nothing was wrong at the bunker. And then Garth to see if he could rustle up some Hunters in the area to watch the house for a few days. Dean hated relying on others – especially when 'others' were the unpredictable hunter kind – but he couldn't take a chance, not with his girls.

"Dean? Dean!" He turned around to find Rebecca staring at him. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," he said automatically.

"Are you in trouble?"

"What? No. Why would you say that?"

"Because as soon as I mentioned a stranger knocking on the door, you burned dinner and then zoned out and now are acting _really _weird. Do you owe someone money?"

"Huh," said Dean but he wasn't really listening. If it was a demon, he would use the knife and one of the holy water flasks in the bedroom closet. If it was an angel...he thought about that for a second. He'd have to see if he had an angel blade in the back of the Impala.

"Dammit, Cas," he said, muttering the Angel's name for the first time in over a year. "What are you doing?"

"Hey!" Rebecca said, face brightening. She was at the stove now, cooking her own sandwich.

"What?" Dean almost snapped, reining in his temper at the last second. Rebecca seemed unperturbed, sliding her sandwich onto a plate.

"That was the guy's name. How'd you know?"

"What was?" Dean said impatiently.

"Cas. Well, no it was something longer. Weirder." Dean's heart skipped a beat, no, skipped about four beats at the mention of the angel on his doorstep.

"Castiel," he said slowly and Rebecca nodded, mouth full of bread and cheese. For some reason that didn't make Dean feel any better. The last time the two of them had spoken, they had agreed to stay away from each other unless there was an extreme emergency. Dean had made it clear to the angel he was done with hunting.

"Castiel," Rebecca tried the name out. "I've never heard that one before." Dean tried to remain calm but it was difficult considering the amount of adrenaline coursing through his body. This was so bad. So, so bad.

Castiel was back and Dean had no idea why. Absolutely no idea.

* * *

**A/N: **Things are getting a tad interesting, aren't they? Thoughts?


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: Thanks for the reviews and I'm so relieved to hear that a lot of you like Dean as a father and like his interactions with the girls. I've been so nervous writing those parts! Thanks for the support! But now things are really going to start rolling...

* * *

"Dean, should I call Mom?" Rebecca asked after another five minutes had gone by. Her stepfather was sitting at the kitchen table, repeatedly running his hands through his hair so that now it stuck up like he'd been electrocuted. He was mumbling under his breath but Rebecca wasn't getting closer to finding out what he was saying or if he was even making any sense. She had washed her dishes and cleaned up the kitchen without being asked and if that wasn't enough to imply she was freaking out about Dean freaking out, she had her cellphone in hand, one painted fingernail over the button that would call her mother.

"No," he mumbled. "Don't call anyone." He stared at her phone as if seeing right through it before his eyes focused and he sat up straight. "Give me your phone," he said, holding out his hand.

"No," Rebecca said, holding it to her chest and giving him a look that suggested he had just asked her to sacrifice her first born.

"Rebecca, give me the phone," he all but growled, standing up and snatching the phone from the teen's hands.

"What the hell?" she screeched, all father-daughter bonding moments gone in the same instant.

"Go to your room," Dean ordered. Rebecca folded her arms tight across her chest, gaze turning cold. She didn't see what the big deal was. Dean was acting weird over some random dude showing up at the house. He wasn't just acting weird, he was completely losing it.

"Not until you tell me what's wrong," she demanded. Dean scowled and she took a step back. He was actually pretty scary when he got mad, not that she had seen Dean mad. In fact, this was probably the angriest she had ever seen him, next to that time Kayleigh had spilled an entire container of glitter in the front seat of Dean's car, the Impala or whatever. Even then he had just pressed his lips together and spent four hours in the garage with the vacuum and roll of paper towels.

"For once just do what you're told," Dean said, pointing down the hall. "Go to your room and do not come out until I tell you."

"I didn't do anything," she whined, her voice lilting up an octave.

"I know," he said and she watched as he shut her phone off completely and stuck it in his pocket.

"Then why am I in trouble?"

"You're not!" Dean took a deep breath and tried again, "You're not in trouble. I just need you to go to your room."

"Fine," Rebecca said and she turned on her heel, making a dramatic exit that ended with a slammed door. But Dean had already locked the back door that led into the yard and moved onto the door connected to the garage. It wasn't until he was at the front door that he said anything.

"Alright Cas," he said to the ceiling. "I know you're listening you bastard, so you might as well show up." Dean waited not so patiently, watching the door to Rebecca's room. If anything happened to his family…

"Hello, Dean."

"What are you doing here?" Dean asked the angel who had materialized in front of him without a sound.

"I think the appropriate response to my greeting is another hello," Cas said, not quite frowning but not smiling either. He was unshaven by a couple days and his hair was shorter than the last time Dean had seen him but he wore a white button down with khaki pants, looking every part of the civilian he was not.

"What is going on?" Dean growled. On his way locking the house down, he had grabbed a gun and Ruby's knife, both tucked into the waistband of his pants, not that either would do any good on an angel. "We had a deal," Dean continued. "You were supposed to leave me alone. It's too dangerous for you to be here. I don't need you leading anything supernatural to my family."

"That's why I am here." Cas said in his low voice. Those blue eyes darted down the hall where Dean's stepdaughter was brooding. "Someone's found you. I'm trying to protect you."

"Who found me?" Dean said.

"I don't know yet," Cas said. "It might be angels or it might be demons."

"This house is warded," Dean protested. "I made sure nothing could get in." Castiel rolled his eyes over to Dean and said in a condescending tone,

"You should have done a better job. You've gotten lazy." It took all of Dean's will power not to backhand the angel across the face.

"Listen to me, Cas. I've got two little girls in this house that need to be protected. You were supposed to be watching this house from afar. You owed me that!"

"I owe you nothing," Cas snarled, taking a step toward Dean who in turn leaned away, feeling uncomfortable for the first time since the angel had shown up. The two stared at each other for a solid minute before Cas looked away. "I don't know what is hunting you, Dean, but I came here to warn you. And to get you out of here."

"Where are we supposed to go?" Dean said.

"The Bunker," Cas said as if it was obvious.

"I can't take them there," Dean said. Opening his old world to his daughters would be a one-way ticket to scaring them out of his life forever. Not to mention Liz had made him promise to never bring up hunting again, which he had been happy to do. Dean had shut that door over a year ago and for the first time in his life, he was okay with not being a Hunter. More than okay. Dean appreciated his new life and woke up most mornings grateful that someone somewhere had decided to give him a second chance to do things right.

"You have no other choice," Cas said. "It's the only place that will keep them completely safe." Dean was silent. He knew Cas was right but it didn't make the decision easier. If anything, it bothered him that the angel had just shown up here all of a sudden with some high and mighty plan to save Dean's family from whatever supernatural thing was coming after them. Protecting them was Dean's job, not Cas's.

"Dean, what's going on?"

Rebecca had come out of her room, arms still crossed but her face was hesitant and she even looked a little frightened, even more so after she saw Castiel standing in her living room.

"That's the guy," she said, stopping before she got any closer. "That's the guy that was asking for you."

"Hello, Rebecca," Cas said. Her eyes narrowed.

"How do you know my name?"

"I'm an -," Cas started but Dean finished the sentence for him.

"He's an old friend."

"Why is he here?"

"He came to help me out with something. It's okay. He's friendly." The angel gave the teenager a smile that was more creepy than anything else, like he was trying too hard to contort his face. She scrunched up her nose and rolled her eyes, directing her attention back to Dean.

"Can I have my phone back?"

"No," he said. "Go pack a bag with a couple changes of clothes for you and your sister. And whatever you need for a couple days away."

"Where are we going?"

"Road trip," Dean said and the look on his face was so serious that Rebecca left without comment.

"Where are the others?" Castiel wanted to know. "Your wife and little one?"

"Piano lesson," Dean said. "They should be home in an hour or so."

"We can't wait that long."

"Well I'm not leaving them," Dean snapped. "So we're going to have to." Cas followed him as he traipsed to his study where he kept the guns. He tapped in the passcode and started pulling firearms out and inspecting each one, throwing a few into his old duffel bag that he kept in the same room. Ruby's knife he kept close to him as well as his favorite pistol.

As he bent to pull the hidden flasks out of the cabinet, his vision went blurry for a second and he swayed against the doorframe.

"Dean?"

"'m fine," he muttered. "Head rush." When he had turned off Rebecca's cell in the kitchen he had also disabled his own so that no one could activate the GPS trackers in them so he had no way to reach Liz. All he could do was wait until she came back.

"Dean, we must go," Cas urged again Dean threw the duffel into the trunk of the Impala, throwing the tarp that usually covered his car into a corner of the garage. "Something's close, I can feel it." Dean shot him a worried look but shook his head.

"I can't leave Liz."

"You would rather risk all our lives?"

"I didn't ask you to stay," Dean said sharply. "Feel free to leave at any time."

"You are just as foolish as before," Cas said. Dean was about to hurl an insult back when there was a scream from inside the house.

"Rebecca!" Dean yelled, sprinting back into the house and down the hallway. The sight that met him was one matched only by his worst nightmare.

A tall man with skin the color of black coffee held Rebecca in a tight grip, one hand around her throat while the other grasped a knife with teeth the size of Dean's fingers.

"Dean," Rebecca whimpered, tears already staining her cheeks. Glass crackled beneath their feet as the man took a step backward toward the open window, dragging Dean's stepdaughter with him.

"Let her go," Dean said. "It's not her you want. It's me. You and I both know that." The man grinned, displaying two gold teeth. When his head cocked to the side, his eyes flickered to black and Dean's grip on Ruby's knife tightened. The demon hadn't glanced at it once; he wasn't the least bit scared of the ex-hunter or the angel standing next to him.

"That's where you're wrong, Dean Winchester," the demon said, his voice surprisingly silky for such a rough looking man. "I want everything that's yours. You would just be a bonus." Rebecca whimpered again then gasped as the man's fingers tightened around her throat. Dean leaned forward as Cas took a step closer, wielding an angel blade in his right hand.

"Don't come any closer," the demon said. "Or you know what happens." Dean had been in this position enough times to know exactly what was going to happen. They were going to stand there in a stalemate until the demon took action, either by leaving with Rebecca or killing her and fleeing. So Dean made a move first, diving forward, Cas still at his elbow.

Dean didn't go for the demon or even for Rebecca but for the knife. He just wanted to get his daughter as far away from it as possible. His hands found purchase on the demon's wrist but the man's grip was strong and Dean struggled to twist the knife away. Meanwhile, Cas had managed to wrangle Rebecca away from the demon and had her across the room.

"Stupid Winchester," the demon said but Dean wasn't as out of shape as he thought and managed to put enough weight behind his actions to snap the demon's wrist. The man wailed and stumbled back a step but recovered as Dean leapt forward, Ruby's knife outstretched. The demon had just enough time to give an evil glint of his eye before he tilted his head back and exited his host body. Just in time for Dean to sink his knife into a living, breathing human being.

The body fell against the wall and Dean fell with it, blood seeping out of the chest wound and soaking his hand. He stumbled for a second, desperate to get away from the dead man and then righted himself.

"Are you injured?" Cas asked, once again at his side. Dean took quick inventory; besides a pounding in his head he was fine.

"I'm fine. Not this guy, though," he said, bumping the body with the toe of his shoe.

"Not our problem," Cas said coldly.

"Are you okay?" Dean asked Rebecca who was pressed up against the opposite side of the room. Although her tears had stopped, she was staring from Dean to the bloody knife in Dean's hand to the dead man sprawled on her bedroom floor. She was bleeding from a few cuts on one side of her face but seemed surprised when Dean pointed them out.

"From the glass," Cas said, taking a closer look. "Just superficial. She's fine." Dean ignored him.

"I know you're probably really scared right now," Dean said. "And I'm so sorry, Rebecca. But there are more people after us and we need to get out of here." She turned her terrified gaze from the corpse to Dean.

"I want my mother," she said and it was the last thing Dean expected to hear from her.

"I know," he said. "Listen, Cas is going to take you somewhere safe and I'm going to wait for your mother and sister and come later. Okay?" But when Cas reached out for the girl, she shied away, cowering against the wall.

"Don't touch me," she said shrilly. "I'm not going with some stranger. Someone just tried to _kill me_."

"I know," Dean said again but Rebecca wasn't done.

"And then you killed him. You killed someone, Dean. In my room. And it was all after this guy showed up out of nowhere. So no, I'm not going with him." Dean heard Cas make a noise behind him and turned around.

"What?"

"She's very intelligent," Cas said. "She reminds me of Sam." Dean's head throbbed and he rubbed his forehead with his non-bloody palm. He turned back to Rebecca.

"I promise you that Cas is not going to hurt you. He's going to keep you safe."

"I want you to keep me safe," she said, surprising him again. He would of thought she would be petrified of Dean after seeing him sink a knife into some guy's heart. He had expected her to be frightened, angry, confused, but she was looking at him only with pleading eyes.

_Protect me_, they said.

"Dean," Cas started.

"Shut up," Dean said. "I'm thinking." But his head was exploding with pain and his thoughts kept slipping away before he could do anything with them.

"Fine," Dean said through gritted teeth a minute later. "Cas, go do a sweep of the town and tell me where Liz and Kayleigh are. We might have to go get them." Rebecca's eyes widened when Cas disappeared in front of her. She looked to Dean for an explanation but he had sunk onto her bed and was rubbing his eyes.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"Yeah. Did you pack your stuff?" She shook shards of glass off the top of her overnight bag in which she had stuffed clothes for her and her sister as well as a toothbrush, a hairbrush and other essentials. As an afterthought, she had thrown in her sister's favorite stuffed animal, a ratty looking dog she had had since she was a baby. Otherwise she would never hear the end of it when it came time to go to bed. All that seemed trivial now though. Who needed a toothbrush when you had just been almost strangled and knifed by an intruder?

"Jesus Christ," Dean groaned from a couple feet away, the knife beside him on the bed as he cradled his head in both his hands. It felt like someone had lit a fire in his skull.

"Dean?" He didn't answer and she had no idea what to do. Here she was standing in her destroyed bedroom with her stepfather who looked like he was dying. Rebecca had read about things like brain aneurysms and she was smart enough to know something was very wrong. Was she supposed to call 911? Or wait for the Castiel guy to come back? She just didn't know. She was about to start crying all over again when Cas appeared with a rustling pop, face grim.

"Bad news. I couldn't find them. Dean, what's wrong?" Without glancing at her, Castiel knelt before Dean who was now almost completely folded over at the waist. "Dean what is it?" The Hunter muttered something that Rebecca couldn't detect.

"We need to get out of here," Cas said a moment later, standing up.

"What's wrong with him?" Rebecca asked.

"I don't know."

"Who was that guy?" she said.

"I don't know." Rebecca huffed.

"What _do_ you know?" Cas narrowed his eyes at the young girl; she was certainly Dean's daughter, from the glare in her eyes to the sarcastic flavoring of her words.

"Get your stuff," he said, disappearing and reappearing a second later with a beat up duffel bag. "We're leaving."

"Where are we going?"

"You ask too many questions," he told her before reaching out to grip both her and Dean at the same time. The floor lurched beneath her feet and then everything went black.

xxx

One minute Dean was talking to Rebecca and the next he was lost somewhere in a maze of pain. He had never felt a pain quite like it; it felt like someone was probing through his brain with white-hot coals for fingers. He felt his body sit down and then he heard a distant voice that might have been Rebecca's but the scene in front of him was gone. Everything was distorted and blurry and Dean had the distinct memory of staring into one of those kaleidoscope toy things as a child.

The pain faded to a sharp throbbing and Dean picked up his head. But he wasn't in his house anymore and Cas and Rebecca weren't anywhere in sight.

Instead, he was in a non-descript motel room, sitting on some random bed and there was a figure sitting at the table across the room, his back to Dean.

"What the hell?" Dean muttered, shaking his head to get rid of the lingering pain. It went nowhere. The figure, which came more into focus as the seconds ticked by, turned at the sound of Dean's voice. The voice that came next was one Dean hadn't heard in five years, one he had never expected to hear again at any point in his life and maybe not even after that.

"Hey, Dean."

"Sam?"


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: **Two chapters this week so if you missed Chapter Four, please make sure to read before this one, otherwise it won't make any sense! And again, thank you so much for all the follows and favorites and reviews. They mean a lot to me!

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_"Sam?"_

"Don't look so surprised," Sam said, grinning the same grin Dean had grown up with. "Didn't you miss me?"

"I'm dreaming," Dean said, standing up and wincing when a bolt of pain shot through his head. So much for not being able to feel pain while you were dreaming.

"No," Sam said, reaching behind him and picking up a fast food bag. "You're not. Are you hungry?" Dean stared at the greasy offer then slid his gaze to his brother. Along with the pain, his head felt as if it was filled with fog that created a sort of wall around his thoughts. He couldn't quite remember what he had been doing before he ended up in this motel room. Was he on a hunt?

"Fine," Sam said, taking the bag back. "Don't eat."

"What is going on?" Dean demanded.

"You tell me," Sam said, motioning for Dean to sit next to him, which the elder Winchester did if only because he had no idea what else to do. Dean took another moment to look at his baby brother. Sam looked _good._ He was dressed in a baby blue button down with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a pair of dark jeans that looked more expensive than anything the Hunter had ever owned while alive. His hair was still a bit long for Dean's liking but Sam's eyes were bright and happy as he smiled at Dean, hands relaxed on his knees. It was as if all the trials and pains of his life had melted away, leaving behind this completely undamaged, unbroken essence of his brother.

The last time Dean had seen him, his tall frame had been diminished to skin and bones with no color to speak of, but this Sam, the one inexplicably sitting in front of him, was broad shouldered and muscular with enough color to make Dean assume his brother had just been somewhere tropical. That is, if he didn't know better. Because he did.

Dean had sat in that hospital room five years ago and watched his little brother take his last breath. He had held his hand as the cancer took over the body sitting across from him and he had watched the same body being lowered six feet into the earth. Dean had cried and yelled and his heart has shattered a little more every morning when he woke and remembered what had happened. So yeah, Dean knew better.

"You're dead," Dean said at last because at this point that was all he was sure of. "You're dead so I must be dreaming."

"I already told you you're not," Sam chastised. "You're not asleep. Well, not really."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Sam sighed, digging a french fry out of the bag. He offered one to Dean who waved it away. The only thing he wanted right now was answers.

"It's a little complicated."

"No," Dean said all of a sudden. "I know what this is. I've been captured by a djinn, haven't I? This is all some sick hallucination while out there in the real world some supernatural piece of crap is harvesting my blood!" He stood, throwing the chair off balance so that it crashed to the floor. He strode across the room; he was going to find that son of a bitch and get himself out of this mess. But when he went to throw open the motel door, it wouldn't open. Not that it was locked, more like the handle was jammed. Dean shimmied it and then kicked it but the door still wouldn't budge. His fingers explored the edges to see if he could disable the hinges but this door didn't seem to have hinges. In fact, the door didn't seem to be anything more than a piece of wood glued into the wall.

"You can't get out," Sam said. He hadn't moved from his chair and was still eating french fries one by one.

"Then I have to kill myself," Dean muttered, reaching for his gun and finding his waistband empty. No gun, no knife. Not even his penknife he always carried with him day in and day out. Glancing around the room he found there were no weapons in sight. What kind of dream was this? A life where Dean didn't have weapons?

"Wrong again," Sam said. "Here, have a burger." Dean walked back over to the table but he didn't sit down and he didn't even glance at the food. He stood directly in front of his brother until Sam looked up at him again, those hazel eyes wide and innocent.

"I watched you die," Dean said but he was starting to doubt himself. "I was there in the hospital, I saw it happen, Sammy." His voice cracked over his brother's name and he looked away, frustrated for himself for getting so emotional. He had to keep his head about him so that he could get himself out of this situation.

"You're right," Sam said softly, wiping his hands on a napkin before standing. "I died five years ago from cancer." He shook his head, looking sad for the first time since Dean had appeared. "And that's still weird to say. Out of all things to die from…" He took a deep breath and looked Dean in the eye. "I'm dead but not," he continued, cringing at the look of disbelief then disgust on Dean's face.

"You're a spirit?" Dean whispered. "But Garth said he took care of…things. You shouldn't be here."

"Yes and no," Sam said. He glanced behind Dean as if something had caught his eye but when Dean looked over his shoulder, he saw nothing. When he turned back around, Sam's face had a tight, anxious look to it.

"Listen, I don't have a ton of time," Sam said. "I'm here to help."

"Help what?" Sam looked at Dean as if his older brother had just told him he didn't know what two plus two was.

"The demons, Dean. The ones that have your family."

"My family?"

"Dammit," Sam muttered. "I must have done something wrong. I'll fix it next time. But for now, try and remember." Dean was getting pissed. Here he was in the middle of nowhere with his maybe-dead-maybe-not brother who was speaking in goddamn riddles.

"Remember what?"

"Your girls," Sam said. "The demons have your girls. Well, your wife and little girl. Rebecca, the older one, she's okay. Cas has her."

"Cas?" Dean said. "I haven't talked to Cas in -," he broke off because that wasn't right. He had _just _been talking to Cas. The angel had shown up out of nowhere and –

"Oh god," Dean said, remembering it all in a rush. His head throbbed as the tidal waves of memories crashed into his brain. "I have to get back there." Sam's figure was now trembling – no, vibrating was more like it – and when he spoke his words were slurred.

"I'm going to help, Dean," Sam said. "Just get to the bunker. I'll find you there."

"Sam!" Dean called but the ground was rippling beneath his feet as if an earthquake was tearing the world apart. The pain in his head spiked and Dean's knees buckled, sending him sprawling onto the bucking floor. His vision went from blurry to black in a matter of seconds and the room disappeared.

xxx

He woke flat on his back, lying on something soft. Dean groaned and rolled onto his side, the action making his stomach heave so that waves of nausea wracked his body.

"Here," a voice said and a wastebasket was stuck under his nose just in time. He emptied the contents of his stomach and then some, wiping his face with the back of his hand when he was finished.

"Take it slow," the voice said. "You were out for a long time."

"How long?" Dean said, voice hoarse. He cleared his throat and spit into the trash, throwing his legs over the side of the bed. His vision was still a little blurry but it was getting clearer with each second.

"About four hours."

"Kevin?"

"Hey, Dean."

The kid – who wasn't so much a kid anymore – was sitting at the desk in Dean's room at the bunker. His hair had gotten long again but all remaining baby fat from his face was gone and his eyes were more serious, not as playful as they had once been.

"Cas is here?"

"Yeah. He's in one of the back bedrooms with…Rebecca."

"The demons!" Dean growled, trying to stand and swaying against the wall.

"Hey, easy," Kevin said, gripping Dean's arm to steady him.

"What happened?" Dean said, trying to shake off the grogginess. He felt as if he'd been shot full of tranquilizers. What the hell was going on?  
"I thought you could tell me that. All Cas said was that some demons got hold of your wife and daughter." Dean's blood froze and if there had been anything left in his stomach, he would have thrown up again. Liz and Kayleigh. They weren't here with him. He had left them behind, left them while he ran for safety.

"Fuck!" he yelled, kicking the chair Kevin had just exited. The Prophet only watched, knowing there was little if anything he could do to help at this point.

"We have to go find them," Dean said, spotting his gun and knife on the bedside table, strapping on both weapons. Kevin followed behind as the Hunter stormed out of the room and down the hall.

"You can't!" Kevin said. "Your town is crawling with demons. In fact, every town within fifty miles of your town is crawling with demons. It's suicide to go out there without a plan."

"I have to go," Dean said. He wasn't thinking; he was on hunting autopilot now. He'd left the Impala back at the house so he'd have to take a car out of the bunker's garage but at least he had plenty of weapons in stock here. If only he had another pair of hands.

"Sam would say you're being stupid."

Dean spun around, a wicked glare in his eye as he came nose to nose with Kevin.

"Don't you ever bring up Sam around me. Do you hear me?" But just hearing his brother's name had ignited something in Dean and Kevin could tell.

_I'm going to help, Dean_

It was just an echo of a conversation. Not even a real conversation but one that had happened in a dream.

But if it was just a dream then why could Dean remember every second, every word?

_Just get to the bunker. I'll find you there._

"I need to talk to Cas," he said, abruptly changing direction and walking the other way.

"Yes, good idea," Kevin said, relieved that he had prevented Dean from leaving, at least for now. From what little Castiel had told him, the situation didn't look good. Demons had Dean's family and God only knew what they would try now that they held his most precious possessions captive. Dean would be putty in their hands if someone wasn't there to keep him from acting on pure instinct and emotion.

That's what Cas was for.

Kevin hadn't seen the angel for a while; he only showed up every once in a while but over time, as the years slid by, Kevin had noticed a change in the angel. He wasn't sure if it was being around other angels or not being around humans or maybe just the absence of Sam and Dean's influence but the angel had turned into a colder, harder version of himself. It was as if any signs of a conscience had all but disappeared and Cas had resorted back to being more robot than anything else.

"Here," Kevin said, stopping outside a closed bedroom door. Dean opened it to find a simple setup: just a desk, a chest of drawers, and a bed. Rebecca was curled up under a blanket, her long hair spread across the pillow behind her. She didn't stir as Dean walked in. The cuts on her face needed to be cleaned and he ran the pad of his thumb over the broken skin, feeling an ache deep inside him. He had caused this; an innocent girl was hurt because of him. And two more innocent people were missing. Dean couldn't even bring himself to think about what was happening to his other two family members. If he let his imagination wander too far, he would lose it.

"We need to talk," he said in a low voice to Cas, who was sitting beside the bed, looking more like a guard dog than a guardian angel.

"I'll stay with her," Kevin said. "In case she wakes up."

"Thanks, Kev," Dean said and he shut the door on the two of them, leading Cas out to the main room of the bunker.

"What is going on, Cas? And don't bullshit me, man." Cas's eyes narrowed.

"I know as much as you do, Dean. Maybe less."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"What happened to you earlier? I had to carry you out of that house." Dean shifted his weight from the balls of his feet to his toes and then back again.

"I don't know."

"You know something," Cas accused. "I'm an angel; I can tell when you're lying."

"What I know," Dean said. "Is that ten hours ago, I was living a perfectly normal life with my family and then all of a sudden my home is under siege by demons and now my wife and daughter are missing if not dead!" His voice had escalated and his chest heaved in a great gasp at the end. For the first time since it all started did Cas show any flicker of emotion.

"I'm sorry about your family. If it makes you feel better, I don't think they are dead."

"What makes you say that?"

"It's just a feeling I have. They want you to come to them for some reason. You won't do that if your wife and daughter are dead." Dean shuddered, feeling the anger coiling deep in his stomach.

"Stop saying it like that." Cas didn't understand what he had said wrong but he didn't want to make Dean any more upset than he already was. That would only make this situation more negative and throw them off track.

"What happened to you at the house? Were you hurt?" Dean shook his head, thoughts wandering back to that motel room dream – or whatever it was.

"I saw Sam."

"Sam's dead."

"I know!" Dean said angrily. "That's why none of this makes sense."

"So you dreamed of Sam?"

"I'm not sure. It didn't feel like a dream. Was I asleep?"

"No. You were conscious for a while. Conscious but in extreme pain. You were making all sorts of noises and writhing on the bed." Cas tilted his head to one side. "You don't remember that?"

"No." How could Dean not remember that? Physically, he felt like he'd been through the ringer a couple times; his body ached all over and he was exhausted. But mentally, he was fine. Except that he couldn't remember those hours when he'd been going crazy.

"After an hour or so you finally blacked out."

"And woke up feeling like I've been hit by a tank." Dean paced up and down the room, with only the table lamps providing light. His shadow walked with him, tall and distorted as it rippled over the bookcases along the wall. This was something he had never dealt with before; it was always Sammy who had been messed in the head. Sam who had been the junkie. Sam who let the Satan into his body and mind. Sam who had had the visions, not Dean.

The visions.

"Sam used to have these visions," Dean explained. He was talking to Cas but also trying to work things out on his own and saying it out loud helped. "Back about, I don't know, fifteen or so years ago."

"Because of the demon blood."

"Right." Dean looked up at Cas and stopped in his circular path of the room. "Do you think that's what's going on with me? Am I having visions or something?"

"Any angel could have guessed what was wrong with your brother. He was…off. His essence was corrupted. As far as I can tell, your body and soul are clean. Besides, your brother had visions of the future. Sam is not the future."

"So what then?" Dean said, frustrated. "I'm just seeing my dead brother for the hell of it?"

"We will figure this out," Cas said. "What did Sam want?"

"What?"

"When you saw him, what did he say?"

"Not much," Dean admitted. "He said he was trying to help. He told me to go to the bunker and that he would come back."

"So you'll have another vision or dream or whatever." Dean shrugged; the thought of going through all that again was slightly terrifying. The Hunter had a high tolerance for pain but it wasn't just the pain that worried him, it was the utter loss of energy he had woken up to. It was getting better but he was still lethargic and dragging his feet. Dean couldn't afford to be anything less than one hundred percent if he had any chance of defeating the demons holding his family hostage.

"We need a plan," Dean said, finally sinking into one of the chairs. Light spilled over his face, casting a shade of yellow over his already pale features.

"You probably don't want to hear this but I don't know what good you're going to be able to do. One hunter against an army of demons? The odds are impossible." Dean glared at him.

"You're right. I didn't want to hear that." Cas didn't apologize but in his eyes was a flare of interest.

"You love them?" he asked the Hunter. He had known Dean a great number of years and only seen him this upset on a few occasions – all of which had been when Sam was in trouble. But now Sam was gone and Cas wasn't sure where all this excess emotion was coming from. It was so unlike Dean, who almost never let his feelings get the better of him.

"Yes," Dean said distractedly, scraping at his facial hair as he tried to sort out some type of plan. Not matter what Cas believed, Dean wasn't about to just sit here and do nothing.

"Like you loved Sam."

It wasn't a question.

Dean gaze landed on the angel who looked confused. He didn't want to get into this, not now, especially not with this strange, detached version of the Cas he had known. He was saved from replying by a voice coming from the entrance of the room.

"Dean?"

Rebecca stood at the mouth of the hallway, her clothes rumpled, hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. There was a red imprint on one cheek where she had fallen asleep on her hand; it matched the redness of her other cheek that bore the effects of the shattered glass.

"Hey, sweetheart," Dean said. She swallowed and moved further into the room and Dean could see she had been crying again and was trying desperately not to start again now.

"Where are Mom and Kayleigh?" Dean bit his lip. Now was when he had to decide how much he wanted to tell her. He wanted nothing less than to tell her the truth, to fracture her safe and secure world. She didn't deserve that.

But when he caught her eye and saw the hard, determined look beneath the frightened exterior, he realized he had no choice but to tell the truth. She might not have deserved what had gone down at the house but she also didn't deserve to be lied to. Not again.

"We think they were kidnapped," he said and her eyes grew wide.

"By who?" Dean could feel Cas staring at the back of his head but he just reached out a hand, willing Rebecca to come closer. She placed her hand in his and he drew her close to his body.

"We're not sure yet. But I promise you we are going to find out. I'm going to get them back." There was almost as much skepticism in her reply as there was fear.

"How can you promise that? I'm not stupid, Dean. I'm not a baby."

"No, you're not. But I – I've had some practice with this type of thing." If possible her eyes grew even bigger.

"What do you mean?" She didn't let him answer. "Were you actually in the FBI? I was joking about that, you know." At any other point in time, Dean would have laughed. But right now it felt as if his body would never make that noise again.

"No, I wasn't in the FBI. It's complicated." Instead of insisting that he tell her what was so complicated, Rebecca took a step forward, leaning into Dean. She wasn't usually the touchy-feely type but all she wanted right now was some type of physical contact. A hug or a pat on the shoulder – something that would signify at least a little reassurance. Dean felt her small body

pressing into his and immediately pulled her into his arms. The embrace was so familiar; it bled the same flavor of comfort that Dean used to reserve for a young Sam. So many times, teenage Dean had wrapped his much larger arms around his little brother. When Sam was real little, he would tell Dean it was the only safe place from the monsters.

"It'll be okay," he whispered in her hair, running a callused hand over her hair, smoothing out the knots. She sniffed and nodded against his chest but didn't let go. Dean could feel her heart racing and her shoulders quaked with the threat of another bout of crying but as he held her tight, she seemed to calm slightly, drawing away after another minute.

"Shouldn't we call the police?" she asked with just a tremble to her words. Now came the hard part. Dean could stop the truth where it was and go on pretending that it was just bad men who had taken Liz and Kayleigh. Or he could fess up and admit that there was a whole lot more going on than your average kidnapping.

"The men that took your mom and sister…they weren't normal guys. They are very good at what they do. And that have certain…abilities that make them much more dangerous than others."

"Like what?"

"They aren't human, Rebecca."

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**A/N: **Thoughts?


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N: **Something went wrong with the spacing and whatnot in the story when I started separating it into chapters and I found this little gem smack in the middle of two chapters. So it became it's own; that's why it's so short. Sorry! Also: when I started writing this story I never intended Rebecca's character to have much influence in the story but as you can see...her character has a mind of her own. I'm still working out all her kinks and stuff so if she's being annoying or if there's something you'd like to see her do/say, feel free to let me know! OC's are touchy subjects, I know. Thanks for the follows and favorites and especially the reviews!

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_"The men that took your mom and sister…they weren't normal guys. They are very good at what they do. And that have certain…abilities that make them much more dangerous than others."_

_ "Like what?"_

_ "They aren't human, Rebecca."_

Rebecca's reaction was to switch her gaze from Dean to Cas, who was still standing a few feet away, watching the exchange with a blank expression. She still didn't know who he was but she thought it was rather rude of him to be acting so impatient while her family was in the middle of a disaster. She decided she didn't like the man – Castiel his name was – very much. And with that decision, she also made up her mind that she completed trusted Dean now. Her stepfather sat in front of her with a certain calm demeanor. Calm but focused, like a string pulled taut waiting for the right moment to snap. She should have guessed Dean had such big secrets, like a hidden cave in the middle of the woods. But she wasn't mad. Which was weird, because usually if someone lied to her, it made her furious. And judging by the trepidatious look on Dean's face, that's exactly what he expected.

"What do you mean not human?"

"There are things in this world, things that most people don't know about. Bad things."

"Like what?"

"Well, vampires and werewolves are real, for one." Her eyes narrowed but she couldn't detect any kind of bullshitting coming from him. And Rebecca was pretty good about knowing when people were lying to her.

"How do you know? Have you seen one?" Something like a chuckle rose from Dean's throat but it was much harsher, rougher. As if someone was strangling his vocal cords. He coughed to cover it up.

"Yes, I have."

"When?" Dean sighed and pulled out the chair next to him, motioning for her to take a seat. He thought he might have been able to get away with just the broad outline of things like he had with her mother but Rebecca wanted the details.

"Remember my brother Sam?" She nodded. "He and I used to hunt them. For a long time."

"Before you met Mom?"

"Way before." Things were starting to get more confusing but Rebecca was smart; she read a lot of books. It really only made sense that there was more to life than what went on day to day. Deep in her bones, she had known her whole life, had at least hoped, that there was something else out there. Something _more._

"The man who had me back at the house had black eyes," she said. "He wasn't human?"

"No."

"Was he a vampire?"

"No." Again, Dean hesitated but she seemed to be taking this so well. Better than her mother, better than almost anyone he had had to explain the supernatural to over the years.

"A werewolf?" He shook his head, forcing himself to say the words,

"That was a demon." Rebecca let out a shaky breath.

"That sounds bad." Dean wished for about the millionth time since he'd known her that his stepdaughter wasn't so intelligent. She picked up on subtle hints, on the tone of someone's voice, the way they moved their body when they spoke. He wasn't going to get away with anything tonight.

"So when you stabbed that man, the demon died?" Dean grimaced.

"No. A lot of black smoke came out of the man right before I got to him; that was the demon." He waited in anticipation for the next question, wondering if it would change the way she looked at him.

"So you killed a guy."

"Yes. But I had to. He was going to hurt you and I told you I would never let that happen." He waited for the accusatory glare or the judging purse of her lips but instead she just held steadily onto his gaze, thinking it over. The fact Dean had killed a man in her bedroom was intimidating and a little scary but Rebecca also hadn't forgotten what it felt like when the man's fingers had wrapped around her throat and squeezed. Or the terrified chill that spread through her when he brought his knife inches from her skin. She wouldn't admit it but a small part of her was happy that man was dead, even if a supposed demon had been controlling him.

"What happened to the demon then?" she asked. "Where did it go?"

"I don't know. You can't follow them. Not easily. He probably went looking for another body to use." Again, her eyes turned to Cas.

"How do I know it's not in one of you?" she said, leaning away from the two men. "You could be trying to trick me." Dean pulled at the neckline of his shirt, revealing his tattoo. She had, of course, seen it before, during the summer when they went to the pool or sometimes when he came back after a run without a shirt on. But she had never thought to ask him what it meant.

"This is an anti-possession tattoo," he said. "It means there's no way a demon could possess me. So you know I'm always me."

"What about him?" she said, jerking her chin at Castiel.

"A demon could never possess me," Cas said, puffing out his chest. "I'm an angel of the lord."

"No, you're not," Rebecca said automatically. She had never heard anything more ridiculous. Vampires? Sure. Demons? Okay. But angels?

"Yes. I am."

"Where's your halo?" she asked.

"Angels don't have halos. Humans made that up." She stood and walked closer, folding her arms across her chest and giving the apparent "angel" a cursory onceover. He sure didn't look like one. His shirt was wrinkled and there was a stain on one shoulder. His pants were a little too long and he held himself slightly stooped over, not exactly the posture of an angel of the lord.

"Don't you at least have wings?" she said.

"Not ones visible to humans. If you were to see my true form, your eyes would burn from their sockets." Rebecca shrank back, not from the disturbing image he'd created but in the casual way he said it.

"Cas!" Dean said.

"What? It's the truth." Dean just shook his head. He could hardly handle either one of them by themselves and now that they were in the same room, his head was starting to hurt again.

"It's late," Dean said, standing. "You should go back to sleep," he told his stepdaughter. "Unless you're hungry or something?" She shook her head, eyeing Cas with wariness. It didn't matter if he was an angel, she still didn't like him. Her mom always told her to follow her instincts when it came to people – guys especially – and so that's what she was going to do.

"I'll be back out in a bit," Dean told Cas. "We can finish our talk then."

"Fine."

"You guys don't really get along, do you?" Rebecca observed as they walked back to her room. Dean stopped at the bathroom, pulling her inside and digging a first aid kit out of a cabinet. He didn't answer the question.

"Sit there," he said, motioning to the toilet seat. She did and he started cleaning out the cuts.

"That hurts!" she whined, leaning away from his hand.

"You don't want it to get infected," Dean said, brushing the cotton ball against her skin. She clenched her jaw but didn't move. Even though Dean had taken care of his fair share of injuries, it had been Sam who had fallen into the natural role of caretaker during their later years. He was the one who was good at soothing people and being gentle. Not Dean, who often felt as if he was going to hurt someone more than help them.

Rebecca watched her stepfather's face as he worked; noticing the lines that she didn't think had been there yesterday. The girls at school all commented on how young Dean was (and how attractive which was gross) but up close, tonight, he looked old. Too old to be fighting things like demons. He was just a guy, for goodness sakes.

"Is this why you never tell Kayleigh that her monsters aren't pretend?" she asked. Dean unscrewed a tube of antiseptic cream and started applying it. The coolness of the cream actually felt good against the swollen cuts.

"I'd rather she thought she knew how to stop them then just ignoring them."

"Does Mom know about this?" Dean nodded.

"Before I asked her to marry me, I told her. I brought her here."

"Mom was here?" For some reason, that made Rebecca feel better, knowing that her mother had walked the same hallways she was hiding in. It was like being with her but not being with her.

"Yep."

"Ow," Rebecca said as she yawned, feeling the cuts stretch as her muscles contorted.

"They'll feel better in the morning," Dean said, washing the excess cream off his fingers and putting away the first aid kit. As he was drying his hands, his vision went blurry for a second and he had to grip the sink for support. Rebecca was already on her way out the door and didn't notice.

"Not right now," Dean muttered to his reflection. The pain subsided and he breathed out. There was no way he could hunt like this; next time he talked to Sam he was going to have to –Dean stopped that thought; he couldn't start thinking of Sam like that. It had been a dream or a screwed up vision but that Sam was existed only in Dean's mind. He wasn't real. Dean was not about to start having conversations with people inside his head.

"Dean?" Rebecca said after she had changed into her pajamas and was in the same bedroom as before. She didn't let Dean see but under the covers she tucked her little sister's stuffed animal.

"What's up?"

"I don't think I can sleep." Dean, who had been leaning against the desk trying not to rub his head, came to sit on the edge of the bed. "I can't sleep knowing Mom and Kayleigh are out there with the demons."

"I know, kiddo," Dean said. "It's hard knowing that someone you love is in trouble. But think of it this way: you have to be well rested for tomorrow. You don't want to be too exhausted to help, right?"

"Are you going to sleep?"

"After I talk to Cas," Dean lied. There would be no sleep for him tonight, especially with his head playing host to a jackhammer.

"You'll wake me up if something happens, right?"

"Of course," Dean said. "Here, turn over and I'll rub your back."

"I'm not a little kid," she said, referring to the fact this was what he sometimes did with Kayleigh when she woke up in the night.

"I know," he said, nudging her onto her side before she flopped to her stomach, pulling her pillow in close. She was a little tired, after all. Dean's hands were large and they ran slow, rhythmic circles over her shirt. It did feel good. It wasn't long before her eyes shut and didn't reopen.

Dean crept out of the room but didn't go back to the main room where Cas was waiting for him. He just had to take a breather, a minute to regain his thoughts and hopefully to relieve some of the pain and pressure building behind his skull.

"What the hell," he groaned, sinking onto his old bed. It was just as comfortable as he remembered it but he barely had time to recognize how tired he was when the pain spiked and he buried his head in his hands, raking his nails against his skin. Nothing had any effect on lessening the pain and soon Dean was blind to everything.

Blind and helpless.

* * *

**A/N: **Thoughts?


	7. Chapter 7

Dean wasn't surprised when his vision came back and he was standing in the same motel room as before. Everything was the same except that Sam was lying on the bed with the TV remote in one hand, the other behind his head.

"Did you miss me?" he teased as Dean sat down on the other bed.

"You have got to tell me what's going on," Dean said. "It feels like my head is exploding. Is that you?" Sam muted the TV and sat up, sliding to the edge of the bed so he was right across from Dean.

"I told you I'm trying to help," Sam said.

"By messing with my head? Not cool, Sam."

"Would you rather I leave?" he asked seriously. He knew what Dean would say to that. That even after all this time, he wasn't going to shut the proverbial door in Sam's face. Dean had been waiting five years to have another chance to talk with his brother. Dean knew it too.

"No," Dean said. "I just want to know what's going on."

"Okay," Sam said, leaning back. "Here goes: I'm inside your head." Dean snorted.

"Obviously. Why else would I be having these visions?"

"They're not exactly visions," Sam said, a flicker of nervousness marring his otherwise relaxed features. "I told you I'm a kind of spirit," he continued. "But not the kind we used to hunt. Because you burned my bones, I couldn't come back in my own image. So I'm kind of borrowing yours."

"You're possessing me?" Sam winced.

"You don't have to think of it like that." Dean was getting upset; Sam had spent almost his whole life fighting this kind of thing. He _knew_ Dean loathed supernatural things more than anything else and here is was taking control of Dean.

"How the hell am I supposed to think about it?"

"Well, for one, I'm not controlling your actions. And I never will. I promise."

"No, you're just causing me extreme pain and unconsciousness," Dean said sarcastically.

"I needed to take up residence in your mind. That way we can talk. The pain and everything is just me tugging at your subconscious so we can have talks like this. I built this place for us," Sam said, sweeping an arm around the hotel room.

"Can't we talk in a less painful way?" Sam looked sorry for the first time and he shook his head.

"Sorry, I don't know another way to do this. Maybe it will get easier with time."

"How come we've never heard of this? It must happen, right? But I don't remember ridding spirits from anyone's head."

"That's because people usually either go crazy or don't remember." He told Dean this as if he was explaining scientific reasoning.

"So I'm going crazy?"

"Not necessarily. I think it works better when the spirit and the host knew each other well in real life. But you know how some people get really bad migraines? Sometimes, that's a spirit wedging themselves inside their mind."

"Awesome," Dean said sarcastically. None of this explaining was making him feel better.

"But I'm going to be careful," Sam promised.

"What are you doing in my head anyway?" Dean wanted to know.

"I told you, to help."

"I know, I know. But why? Aren't you happy up there? I can handle this, Sam." The younger Winchester was quiet, getting up and walking over to the table, flipping through a couple books. Dean recognized the tell tale signs of stalling.

"Sure, I'm happy," Sam said. "Heaven's great. Paradise." But his words fell limp, totally unconvincing.

"I can still tell when you're lying, Sammy," Dean said. Sam turned to his brother, pain etched on his face.

"I miss my life down here," he said. "I miss you and Kevin. I miss my family." Dean tried to gather his words, tried to think of something to say that could comfort his spirit of a brother but he had never been in this situation before. He had no idea what to say. Because as far as Dean was concerned, Sam was right. It would suck to die and leave behind your home and everyone you loved, no matter how great Heaven was.

"Have you seen them lately?" Sam asked when Dean didn't answer.

"Kat and Parker?"

"Yeah. I can only catch glimpses up there. Are they okay?"

"They're fine. They're good."

"Just tell me something," Sam begged and Dean couldn't say no. He had never been able to resist Sam's puppy dog eyes, as a child or an adult.

"I mean, it's been a while since we've seen them. The kids are so busy with school and everything…but last time I saw Kat she was doing really well. She was getting ready to publish another book and her last couple were pretty successful, so they're doing okay financially. Parker started soccer this year and he definitely got his athletic abilities from me, not you." Sam forced out a laugh but all this information somehow made him even more depressed. Every part of him ached. Dying had been the most difficult thing he'd ever done. Once upon a time he thought he'd been ready to leave this world but after spending so much time away from the ones he loved, he realized that to die young wasn't the least bit romantic. He'd give anything to go back.

Dean was Sam's link to his old world; his brother was the one way Sam could stay connected. He was sorry that he was causing Dean pain but it's not like Sam had a lot of room here; there was less space to stretch his legs than in the passenger seat of the Impala. Besides, he was only borrowing Dean's mind for a little bit; he would leave eventually. Once he helped Dean get rid of the demons and once he was satisfied that he could return to Heaven without being totally miserable.

"So do you know anything about these demons?" Dean asked, unaware of the turmoil going on in Sam's own head.

"Not so far," Sam said, opening his laptop. "But I've been researching and there weren't any demonic omens near you in the past six months. Even in the past year. No weird storms, no crop failures, stuff like that. It's like they came out of nowhere."

"They did," Dean said, thinking back to the demon in Rebecca's room. There had been absolutely no warning. Except for Cas who hadn't quite shown up soon enough. It was odd that he had knocked on the front door when he could have easily appeared to Dean at anytime.

"If it wasn't for Cas, it would have caught me completely off guard."

"Cas is here?" Sam said, looking more alarmed than the angel deserved.

"Don't you know that? You're in my head."

"I told you, Dean. I'm not trying to take over your body. I can't see what you see unless I push further."

"Can you read my thoughts?" Dean said suspiciously. He loved Sam but the idea of anyone being able to know what he was thinking was disconcerting.

"No! Think of me just tucked in the corner of your mind. Just sitting here."

"Pretty big corner," Dean grumbled as his head throbbed again. Sam didn't answer, just bent back over his laptop.

"So you're next move is going to be to summon Crowley, right?"

"I guess."

"What do you mean you guess? You have demons on your tail and you're not going to summon the King of Hell?"

"Yeah okay, I probably will. I just haven't had a lot of time to think about it. Not with you making yourself right at home in my freaking head. Plus taking care of a child to top it all off."

"I'm sorry," Sam said. "I keep forgetting you lost part of your family. It's just weird to think of you with a wife and kids."

"I have to get them back, Sammy," Dean said quietly, voice cracking over his brother's name. "I can't lose them. Not after losing you."

"Hey," Sam said gently. He did something he would never do in real life and placed a hand on Dean's arm. Dean was surprised to find it warm; the spirits he'd always encountered were cold and biting. "We're going to get them back, okay? We'll figure it out."

"Yeah," Dean said, leaning back to move out from under Sam's embrace. It was still just a little too weird to have his dead brother touching him, no matter how human he appeared. "Well, do me a favor and try to rein in the whole touching my subconscious thing. I need to be able to actually hunt," Dean said. Sam nodded but said nothing. Truth was, he had no idea how to control Dean's pain.

"So, you're going to go back and summon Crowley," Sam said a moment later, typing into his computer. "And then he'll call off the demons and everything can go back to normal."

For some reason, Dean didn't think it was going to be that easy. Nothing was ever that easy.

xxx

When Rebecca woke, the room was dark and Dean had left. She lay there for a minute, willing herself to go back to sleep. The clock across the room glowed red; she had only been asleep a few hours. The cuts on her face burned and her throat was dry, making it hard to swallow. If she hadn't just been through a life-threatening experience and found out that demons and angels were real, she would have thought she was getting sick.

Creeping out of bed for a glass of water, she tried to remember which way it was to the kitchen. The other guy, Kevin, had given her a short tour when they first got here but she had been so out of it and disoriented that she hadn't totally been paying attention. The doors she passed were all closed and made of heavy wood with numbers nailed to them. Her room was number seven. The numbers went up as the hallway went on and when she saw one up ahead that had light coming out of it, she thought she had found her way out of the maze.

But when she peeked in, it was just another bedroom, one that looked similar to hers except it was much more decorated. The guns and knives on the wall would have been what she noticed first if Dean hadn't been lying on the bed. Then she noticed Castiel sitting in a chair in the corner.

"What are you doing?" she said in a quiet voice. Cas turned slowly to look at her, his blue eyes confused and cold at the same time. What was wrong with this guy? He reminded Rebecca of the robots she saw on TV. And not necessarily the good ones either. She had no clue as to why Dean trusted him so much.

"Watching Dean."

"You're watching him sleep? That's creepy."

"He's not sleeping." Rebecca took a step into the room, daring to take her gaze off the angel to look at her stepfather. It was obvious right away that Cas was right. Rebecca moved to the edge of the bed.

Dean was flat on his back, his arms each in a straight line pressed against his sides. There was a sheen of sweat covering his skin and she could actually see his eyes moving underneath his eyelids, like peoples did when they dreamed. But that wasn't all. Dean's muscles were twitching; it was easier to see on his uncovered hands and arms but she could spot the seizing happening beneath his jeans as well. The laces on his boots were shaking. As she watched, her stepfather's neck jerked to the side and he moaned. There was a kid, Jeremy, in her class at school who sometimes had seizures. Last year an ambulance had to be called to the school after he didn't wake up. Watching Dean kind of reminded Rebecca of watching Jeremy on the floor of the cafeteria, quivering violently as adults held him down.

"What's wrong with him?" she whispered, taking a step back despite herself.

"I don't know," Castiel said and she thought she detected some kind of misery behind the three words.

"You're an angel," she said, voice rising in alarm. "Help him!"

"I tried," Cas said and that shut her up. They watched Dean in silence before Cas said,

"Here, you can have this chair."

"It's okay," Rebecca said but he was already standing and so she took the seat. She half-wished she had brought Kayleigh's stuffed dog with her because out of all the things she had witnessed tonight, this was the scariest: seeing Dean laid out on a bed like a corpse, not awake but not asleep either. Had the monsters gotten in him? She leaned over the bed and pushed at his sweaty shirt but the tattoo was still there, standing out in stark contrast to the hunter's pale skin.

"How do you know Dean?" she asked the angel, not able to stand the silence.

"Years ago, I raised him from hell."

"You did _what?_" Castiel frowned.

"I keep forgetting how much you do not know." Rebecca scowled; she hated when adults told her stuff like that. It wasn't her fault she was so young. If they would just tell her things, then she would know and they wouldn't have to say that.

"So tell me," she challenged. She had a feeling that without Dean there to censor what Castiel said, she would be able to find out more information.

"Sam – I guess he would be your uncle – was killed and Dean traded his soul to bring Sam back to life. After a year, Dean died and went to hell. It was my job to go in and rescue him."

Rebecca just stared.

"You're lying," she said but she wasn't sure. She wasn't sure of anything anymore.

"Believe what you will," Cas said, shifting his gaze back to Dean.

"Why did you do it?" she said after a minute.

"Because the archangel Michael wanted to use Dean to fight Lucifer."

"Lucifer as in Satan? The Devil?"

"Yes. It was a complicated matter." For once, Rebecca didn't mind being told that. This _was _complicated.

"So did Dean beat Lucifer?"

"Sam did."

"Oh."

"I told you it was complicated. Perhaps one day Dean will tell you about it."

"I doubt it. He doesn't talk about anything from before he married Mom."

"Life has been difficult on your stepfather, Rebecca. I do not blame him for not wanting to talk about it."

"Yeah," she said quietly.

"Dean has his secrets," Castiel said as the Hunter let out a gurgling noise, as if he was choking. "But he also usually has reasons."

"Yeah," Rebecca repeated, watching Dean. "I'm beginning to get that."

* * *

**A/N: **Thoughts?


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N:** So...looking back over this chapter, I realize it bears strong semblance to what happened to Dean with the Mark of Cain but I'm telling you now, my story has nothing to do with that. It's pure coincidence since this was written months ago. The same goes with Castiel's grace; I changed the facts of canon a bit because this was written before we knew Castiel's grace was burning away in Season Nine. Anyway, just wanted to clear that up! Leave a review and let me know what you think if you get a chance!

* * *

Castiel watched the not sleeping Dean for a long time. He didn't lose track of the time – he never lost track of time – but after a while it ceased to matter. It felt odd to be back in Dean's presence, as if something inside Cas was tipping him the slightest bit off-balance. The Hunter had finally quieted and stopped shaking a little while after Rebecca had fallen asleep in the chair. Cas had moved her to the other side of the bed and now he gazed at his two charges, trying to dredge up some sort of emotion to pair with the situation.

It had been a while since he had allowed himself to feel human, which always happened when he was around the Winchesters. Something in Sam and Dean had unhinged part of the angel. But after the angels had fallen those – wasse is nine years now? – nine years ago, he had had to make a choice. Live as a human forever under the protection of Dean and the bunker. Or move forward and try to steal his grace back and work his way back to Heaven to restore the fallen hierarchy. It was no secret he had chosen the second path.

When Sam left, left to go make a new life for himself, it had shocked Castiel because he never could have predicted the two brothers splitting for any reason. Not even death usually kept them apart. The angel had watched Dean drink himself almost to the death after his brother left, watched him leave for hunts in the middle of the night, eyes bleary from lack of sleep. Telling Cas to 'stay put'. As if Castiel was just an animal to chain up at home.

So he had left, only six months after Sam. Simply had gotten up one morning and walked out of the bunker, walked until he found someone who would give him a ride and then another person and another until he had put enough distance between himself and the Winchesters. That's when he started picking up hints of former angels wandering the earth. He followed those clues for months with an angel blade up his sleeve until he had trapped one of his brothers. He was sorry for tricking the angel but not nearly sorry enough to hesitate stripping the angel's grace from him.

It had taken a while to get used to this new grace but with enough time, Castiel had shaped it to his essence and to his vessel and now there were only the slightest differences in the grace he had been created with and the one he carried now. After that, it was only a matter of serious strategic planning and luck that he had managed to overthrow Metatron and install a new order to Heaven. Cas didn't like to dwell on the details of all he had done to achieve his status; he wasn't particularly proud of it but then again, once he had left Sam and Dean it was easier to see things as a big picture instead of all those annoying emotional details.

Distant though he may have been from emotion, Cas was still relieved and somewhat happy to see Dean Winchester living such a comfortable life. Well, until twelve hours ago. When they talked twelve months ago, Castiel had told Dean he would keep an extra eye on the Hunter's family but really he had just been watching Dean. Like he was watching him now.

Asleep and undisturbed, the Hunter's face was smoothed of all distress, not something that happened very happen. Cas could almost see the child in him, which was ridiculous because the man in front of him was in his forties now. Still, the roughness and unpredictability he had always associated with Dean was gone and in his place just a man. A very dangerous man but still only a man.

Castiel left the room; his grace was restless. Pure instinct drove the angel now and without anything to do, no one to command or even talk to, he grew agitated. The light in Kevin's room was on but the door was closed so Cas passed it by. The Prophet seemed uneasy around him anyway but the angel didn't care enough to find out why.

He settled for pacing the main room, examining one book after another that lined the walls of the bunker. Most weren't interesting, being filled with lore Cas already knew but it was something to keep him busy.

"Hey," a hoarse voice came from behind him some time later. It was Dean, dressed in the same clothes he had been the entire time but much less pale and shaky. The Hunter had a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a glass in the other and set both on the table before sinking into a seat. He poured himself a glass and raised an eyebrow at Cas.

"I don't suppose you want any?"

"No." Dean downed the first glass and went for a second.

"I figured it would help," he said, lifting his free hand, palm down. At first Cas didn't understand but then he noticed the quivering.

"It happened again," Cas said but not as a question. He had little to no idea what was going on in Dean's head and that was perhaps the most unnerving thing of all.

"It did," Dean agreed. He took a break from the whiskey, fiddling with the glass, rocking it against the table as he thought. "Sam's a spirit," he said finally.

"That would make sense if you hadn't burned his bones," Cas said, still standing on the other side of the room. With one hand, he clapped the book he was holding shut and walked closer to Dean.

"He said that didn't matter, not to him. It just meant he couldn't take his shape. That's why he's messing with my head."

"What do you mean messing with your head?"

"I mean," Dean said, still staring down at the mostly-empty glass, "That Sam's spirit is making itself at home inside my mind. It's why my head hurts so much. When he talks to me, I lose it. You saw." He swallowed the rest of his drink in one gulp. It was starting to work. Along with not being so attuned to the shaking, the pain in his head was dulling.

"Dean, that's not right." Castiel did not like one bit what Dean was telling him. Everything about it screamed unnatural and well…unpleasant. Having a spirit jammed inside your skull? If that was even possible, the angel had never heard of anything like it. And he'd been around for a while.

"I know," Dean muttered. "But he said he could help."

"Help how?" That part Dean was still fuzzy about; he didn't understand what exactly Sam could do to help. He only knew he wasn't going to kick his brother out of his head. Not that he even knew how. He was saved from answering when his cellphone began vibrating in his pocket. He had turned it on once he got back to the bunker but he had no idea who could be calling. When he glanced at the screen, it blinked _Unknown Number _at him.

"Hello?"

"Daddy?"

Dean stood abruptly, one knee slamming into the table hard enough that he upset the whiskey bottle. It toppled over and a stream of liquid poured out but Dean didn't notice.

"Kayleigh? Sweetheart, is that you?"

"Yes. Daddy where are you?" Before Dean could say anything else, there was a scuffle on the other end of the phone.

"Kayleigh? Kayleigh!"

"Hello Mr. Winchester." The voice was as smooth as the alcohol dripping to the floor. Dean held the phone tight in his grasp, pressing it up against ear so hard it would have hurt in normal circumstances.

"Who is this?"

"That's for me to know and you to – never mind. For you to never find out."

"If you hurt one hair on her head," Dean threatened. The man on the other end laughed.

"What? What are you doing to do about it, Dean Winchester? You don't know who I am. You don't know where I am. It seems you don't know anything."

"I know I'm going to fucking kill you," Dean growled.

"You're not," the man – he guessed a demon – said. "Because I happen to have two things you want badly. If you want me to put your daughter back on the phone, you're going to have to behave." The whiskey turned in Dean's stomach. It was blackmail: straight and narrow blackmail. And they had him. What wouldn't Dean do for his family? He had proven time and time again he was willing to anything, _anything_, for those he loved.

"What do you want?"

"Not so fast," the demon cooed. "I prefer lengthy transactions. You're going to have to wait this one out, Mr. Winchester." Dean's chest was shrinking, it was getting hard to breathe and it had nothing to do with the ghost inside his head. This was panic.

"Don't hurt them," he said, pleaded. Dean Winchester, pleading with a demon. The shame was almost as strong as the fear. There was silence on the other end then,

"Because I am civilized, I'm going to put the brat back on the phone for a minute. Do not ask her questions about her location. Do not ask her about me. I will be listening."

"Fine," croaked Dean. "Just put her on."

"Daddy, is it really you?"

"It's me, sweetheart. Are you okay?"

"I fell and scraped my knees but I'm okay."

"That's my good girl. You just have to be brave for a little longer, okay? I'm going to come get you."

"Okay." He could tell she was starting to cry, could hear it in the way her words wobbled through the speaker.

"Is your mother there?"

"No. They took her away." The panic flared again but he pushed it down for the time being. It wasn't going to help the frightened little girl on the other end.

"Okay," he said, trying to think of something, anything that would calm her down. "Your sister is here with me. She says hi."

"Can I talk to her?"

"She's asleep right now but you know what? She's keeping your stuffed dog company while you're gone. She'll keep him safe until you get back."

"Fluffy's a girl, Daddy."

"Right, of course," he said but thought he detected a hint of a smile through the phone.

"Time's up," came a voice. "Say goodbye."

"Bye," Kayleigh said obediently.

"Be brave," Dean had enough time to say before the line went dead. He stared at the phone, resisting the urge to hurl it across the room, to place it beneath his foot and grind it into dust. After a minute, he turned to Cas, a fire lighting in his eyes. The same fire that the angel thought had died out with the arrival of tennis shoes and SUVs. It was dangerous and thrilling at the same time; Cas could feel the adrenaline fill the air around them, settling in a haze so thick he was surprised he couldn't see it. It stirred something deep in Castiel, his vessel leeching the emotion from the man standing in front of him.

Dean Winchester was angry.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N: **Keep in mind Abaddon doesn't exist in my 'verse. The last time Dean saw Crowley was back at the church in the S8 finale.

* * *

"Dean, what are you doing?" Cas asked, following the Hunter down a set a stairs that led even farther underground. They headed past the Weapons room and past the Computer room until Dean threw open the door to the one of the storerooms, flipping on the light before digging into a bundle of supplies.

"I need to talk to Crowley," he said, voice muffled as his head was halfway in a burlap bag and then pulled himself out, holding several candles. He shoved them in Cas's hands.

"I do not think that is wise," Cas warned but Dean wasn't listening. He was too busy grabbing a deep bowl and the rest of the ingredients to summon the King of Hell. "The last time you saw him he was mostly human." Dean stopped to look Cas in the eye.

"Is he not the King of Hell?"

"He is," Cas said. "But-."

"But nothing. I need to talk to the King of Hell."

"Dean, I don't-."

"I don't need your approval," the Hunter snapped, taking the candles back and throwing them into the bowl before storming out of the storeroom. Against his better judgment, Castiel followed. Dean took them down another flight of stairs until they were standing in the middle of the dungeon.

"You don't know what's been going on," Cas reminded him. As if Dean needed reminding. No shit he didn't know what had been going on. Neither did he care about that right now; his top priority was talking to that Scottish prick he left in a church all those years ago. Two minutes later, a pentagram was drawn in white chalk and the candles had been lit.

"I can't lose them," Dean said, more to himself than Cas, as he cut into his forearm, holding the pocketknife extra tight to keep it steady. The blossom of pain centered him and he became hyper-aware of everything around him. The dankness of the walls, which had always been slightly damp. The way Cas was watching him from only a few feet away, looking at Dean as if he were a disobedient dog. The feeling of Dean's own thundering heart pounding in his chest.

Castiel said nothing; it was not his place anymore to interfere in the actions of humans. Why he was even still here was a mystery. Well, not such a difficult one that he couldn't figure out the answer a second after he pondered the question. He owed Dean Winchester, would always owe Dean Winchester. That was why he was here. But he didn't have to be happy about it.

"_Et ad congregandum...eos coram me._"

At first nothing happened and Dean started going over the ingredient list in his head but he had done this more than once, even if it had been years. Summoning rituals were etched into his brain even more solidly than the multiplication tables Sam used to quiz him on when they were children. Footsteps came from overhead and Dean hoped that it was Kevin walking around and not Rebecca but he couldn't exactly go check because at that moment, a cloud of dark smoke appeared and Crowley stepped out of it.

The King of Hell looked a little worse for wear. His black suit was dirty; there were obvious stains on the front and dripping to the sleeves. The seam near one of the shoulders was ripped; a black undershirt was peeking through. Never did Dean think he would have been subject to the King of Hell's undershirt preference. Most astonishing was the purple and black bruise on Crowley's cheek, the one that sat just above his fat lip. He stared at Dean for a solid minute before opening his mouth.

"Squirrel," he said somewhat pleasantly, the words slightly slurred by his injuries. "Long time no see. Very long time, if I'm remembering correctly."

"I need to know what's going on," Dean said. Crowley blinked.

"No need to be rude. We haven't seen each other in a good…how many years is it now?" Dean didn't know and he wasn't going to waste the time doing the math. Crowley did it for him.

"Almost nine I think. Next year will be ten. Shall we have a reunion then too?"

"I don't have time for small talk," Dean growled. He could still hear his daughter's voice over the phone, small and frightened. They had kidnapped his little girl and then taken her from her mother. Taken Liz God knows where. Someone had to pay and soon or else Dean was going to flip at the nearest living thing. Or dead thing. He didn't really care.

"I'm sorry about Moose," Crowley went on, ignoring Dean's demand. "I didn't even get a chance to pay my respects before your angel whisked him out from under my nose. I trust he's doing well?"

"He's dead," Dean said blankly, thrown off guard for a second. Crowley narrowed his eyes and smiled.

"That doesn't mean you two haven't been having a chat, does it?" Dean couldn't help it; he glanced behind him to Cas. But the angel was staring hard at the other end of the room, purposefully ignoring what was going on in front of him.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you do. You've got little Sammy locked away in that thick skull of yours, haven't you? No need to be shy about it. Go on then and tell me how you did it."

"Did what?" Crowley gave a dramatic sigh.

"Fine. Don't tell me your secrets. But darling, next time you talk to him, tell him to take it down a notch or else every demon you walk in front of is going to be able to tell you're hosting a spirit in your head. And that's not going to end well for you." Dean glared at the demon, who brushed at the dirt on his suit, looking more than slightly peeved when he discovered the tear.

"Bollocks. This was a new jacket too."

"Call off your demons!" Dean's voice rose so that his words echoed around the dungeon and Crowley looked up.

"What demons?"

"You know which ones."

"Ah, yes, those ones. I do know them. But I can't call them off."

"Why not?"

"They're not mine."

"What do you mean? You run Hell. Every demon is yours."

"Wrong," Crowley said, switching his gaze to Cas for the first time. "Cas buddy, have you not told him?"

"Told me what?" Dean asked, looking between the angel and demon.

"I tried," Cas said, sounding bored. "He didn't listen." Then the angel shrugged. _Not my problem_, he seemed to insinuate.

"Hmm," Crowley said. "This is going to be fun then. Because I know you something you do not, Squirrel."

_Obviously,_ Dean thought, but didn't say anything. The way with Crowley was to let him talk himself out, although Dean could be here all night if it went that route.

"Things have changed a bit since you've been around."

"So what?" Dean couldn't resist asking. The anger was building in him again, drenching him in a hot feeling that spread through his veins. He wanted to do something. No, he wanted to kill something. Now.

"So what?" Crowley repeated incredulously. "So what is that you've missed a bloody lot."

"Clue me in or I'm dousing your ass in holy water," Dean said.

"There's a bit of a war going on at the present moment," Crowley said, sweeping a hand over his stout figure. "As you can see, I was in the middle of it before you dragged me topside."

"A war in Hell? What is there to fight over? Everyone's already dead." Crowley rolled his eyes.

"Have you gotten even more stupid? Ah, I forgot you're a house-husband now. That would dumb anyone down."

"What war? Whose fighting?"

"Well, me. Would you like a button to wear? I just had made them up."

"Crowley, I swear if you don't start talking…" The look on Dean's face was so serious and fierce that Crowley actually reconsidered his taunting and held up his hands in defense. He'd forgotten how dangerous a Winchester could be. Stupid, but dangerous all the same.

"Alright, alright. There's a certain someone – or someones – who think it would be good fun to unseat me from Hell."

"Who?" barked Dean.

"Most of them are non-players," Crowley said. "Small, insignificant demons. Except for one."

"Don't make me ask again," Dean threatened.

"His name is Beelzebub," Crowley said and nodded his head when he saw recognition in Dean's eyes. "So you've heard of him?"

"He has something to do with Lucifer, right?" Crowley considered this and then slowly nodded again.

"You could think of that way. Think of him as Lucifer's older brother."

"That's Michael."

"Lucifer has more than one brother," Crowley said, exasperated. "Stay with me, Squirrel."

"So Lucifer's older brother is trying to steal Hell from you."

"That sums it up rather nicely."

"And those are his demons that have my wife and daughter?"

"I believe so." Dean thought for a moment, pacing the room. Cas had backed himself into a corner and was still looking overly bored. Dean half-expected the angel to start picking at his fingernails the way Rebecca did when she was deliberately ignoring Dean. The two of them made quite the pair. "Can I go now?" Crowley said after a couple minutes of silence. "As we have discussed, I am indeed in the middle of a war."

"No," Dean spat. More footsteps came from upstairs and he wanted to gouge the demon's eyes out when his gaze flickered to the ceiling. Crowley cocked his head.

"You've got another little one up there, haven't you? I can smell her."

"Shut up." But Crowley had struck a nerve and he knew it; it delighted him to see Dean Winchester squirm and oh was he squirming. For some reason, the Hunter had grown attached to this particular human.

"Can I meet her? We could have a cup of tea." A spray of holy water hit Crowley in the face but he smiled as his skin bubbled and then healed. The pain was worth it; antagonizing Dean had always been a favorite game of Crowley's and now he had a whole new level of leverage. There really was no reason for helping the Hunter out at all…except that Crowley wasn't doing so great downstairs and to have a Winchester on his side… Not only _a _Winchester but _the_ Winchester, the only one left, the previous vessel to Michael. That might come in handy. So Crowley was playing along, for the most part.

"Did you know about this?" Dean asked the angel in the corner. Cas lifted his head and sighed.

"I tried to tell you."

"What? Ten minutes ago? You could have told me sooner. What is going on with you, Cas?"

"I'm not your toy," Castiel snapped and Dean reared back on his heels. The angel gave him a glaring look and vanished, taking with him any sense of solidarity Dean had previously felt. What was that about? Since when did Dean treat Cas like a toy? He hadn't seen the guy in ages, hadn't seen him for more than a few minutes in years.

"Ahem," Crowley gave a polite cough and Dean spun around, the flask of holy water raised. "Let's play a game," Crowley said. "I'll give you a hint about Beelzebub."

"Why would you do that?"

"I'm not on great terms with the guy. If there is a chance you could help knock him down a peg that would be most helpful. Of course, you'll probably die in the process but it can't hurt to try. Right?" Dean glowered. He didn't like the idea of helping Crowley; there wasn't a single molecule in Dean's body that trusted the demon standing before him. For all he knew, Crowley could be deliberately feeding him to this Beelzebub. Then again, what else did Dean have to go on? Nothing.

"Dean?" Rebecca's voice came from above and Dean's whole body tensed. He was not letting her anywhere near Crowley.

"What do you want from me?" Dean asked because he knew there was always a price when it came to making a deal.

"Nothing. Yet." Dean shook his head.

"No. I'm not making some blind deal with you."

"Then I guess we're in a stalemate, are we not?"

"Dean!" She was closer this time; Dean had to make a decision. His jaw clenched as his teeth ground together. What would Sam do? Sam would never trust Crowley. God, he wished his brother was standing next to him; these choices had been so much easier to make when there were two of them. Hunting without Sam felt so _off_, like Dean was missing a limb or vital organ. It would take a while to regain a new sense of balance.

The door to the dungeon opened.

"Dean? Are you down there?"

"Stay put, Rebecca," he shouted. "I'll be right up."

"What's it going to be?" Crowley said softly, he himself watching the stairs.

"Fine," Dean said. "Give me the hint."

"We have a deal?"

"Yes, we have a deal." Crowley spent a second eyeing him up and down but then he smiled again, one that had chills creeping up Dean's spine.

"Flies."

"What?"

"That's your hint. Flies."

"As in wings?" Crowley shook his head.

"I told you the hint, now let me out. A deal is a deal."

"I'm coming down!"

"Rebecca, no!" Dean rubbed at the chalk line on the floor with his shoe and Crowley stepped forward, leaning uncomfortably close, stretching onto his tiptoes to place his lips next to Dean's ear.

"Right back in the thick of it, aren't you?" Crowley said quietly to Dean. "You've got a dead brother in your head, a family being held hostage, and your pet angel has turned feral. I'd get yourself under control before you fall apart, Dean Winchester. Because it won't be long."

* * *

**A/N: **Thoughts?


	10. Chapter 10

Crowley had disappeared by the time Rebecca came down the stairs.

"Who were you talking to?" she asked, walking over to him. She was still wearing the previous day's clothes.

"No one." Dean led her back to the stairs so she wouldn't start asking about the odd collection of summoning ingredients still gathered on the floor.

"Yes, you were. I heard you talking to a man."

"You can't know everything, Rebecca," Dean told her. "It's not safe." She pouted for a second then sighed and flopped into a chair.

"I'm hungry." Dean stared at her – through her really – for a moment. All he wanted to do was sit down alone with his bottle of whiskey and every page of lore they had on Beelzebub. He would even be grateful for the head-splitting pain if it meant he could talk to Sam. His brother was so much better at stuff like this. But Dean's head was only throbbing dully from earlier; Sam wasn't around. Meanwhile, there was a thirteen-year-old child looking up at him and she was hungry. Dean had to feed his daughter.

"Okay, let's see what's in the kitchen." Rebecca took a seat at the table pushed up against the wall of the kitchen. It looked more like the kitchen of a restaurant than it did of someone's house. Everything was much bigger than at home. The fridge looked like Dean could easily fit right into it and the stove had eight burners.

"What about Mac and Cheese?" Dean said, holding up a box of noodles. Rebecca wrinkled her nose.

"That's not breakfast food." Dean held back a sigh.

"How about pop-tarts?" Her eyes brightened; her mom never let her have pop-tarts. She said they would rot Rebecca's teeth out of her head.

"Okay."

While they were waiting for the toaster to do it's job, Rebecca noticed the strand of cloth tied around Dean's forearm and she moved over to him, pointing.

"What happened?"

"It's nothing," he said. He couldn't even feel it anymore. His stepdaughter looked at him with a mixed expression, some curiosity, some annoyance, still a flicker of fear.

"You keep a lot of secrets," she stated. It wasn't exactly an accusation but it made Dean uncomfortable.

"Yeah, well, one day you're going to have secrets of your own and you won't want someone poking around asking about them." Rebecca went quiet and Dean felt the guilt bubble up in him again and wished for the hundredth time she wasn't here. Not because he didn't love her but because she was making things ten times more complicated than they should be.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I do have a lot of secrets."

"Castiel says you usually have good reasons for your secrets," Rebecca said softly, staring at her hands, which were folded on the counter in front of him.

"Cas said that?" The toaster dinged and the pop-tarts flew up, their golden crust filling the air with the scent of warm sugar. Dean handed Rebecca the pastry and opened another packet for himself. Maybe the sugar would help the lingering headache. Plus he could still feel the effects of the whiskey; that had not been a smart decision.

"Yeah. He's pretty weird, you know?"

"I know."

"Is he really an angel?"

"Yeah." She bit into her breakfast and chewed, looking thoughtful and not nearly as scared as she had a few hours ago. She was settled into one of the stools but her legs swung back and forth as she was too short to reach the ground.

"What's going to happen now?" she asked after a few minutes. "What are we going to do?" Dean wanted to sigh and run a hand over his face at the question but he kept still.

"I'm going to start reading about the guy who has your mom and sister."

"You know who it is?" Rebecca looked surprised; as far as she knew, Dean hadn't been out of the bunker all morning or talked to anyone except that guy she had heard downstairs.

"Maybe. I have to read and find out."

"Read what?" He shook his head at her, just the shadow of a smile pulling at his lips.

"You ask a lot of questions."

"That's what Castiel said." Dean actually chuckled at that. If the angel was confused by full-grown Hunters, he had know idea how Cas would handle a petulant teenager. It had taken Dean a while himself to get used to living with one. Living with regular humans in general had been a feat in itself.

The two of them finished their breakfast and then wandered back into the main room where Dean started pulling books off the shelves. Anything that had to do with demons, he piled into stacks on one of the tables. He looked up a few minutes later to find Rebecca thumbing through some pages.

"You should not be looking at that," he said, shutting the book. "Go change your clothes or something. Take a shower. Brush your teeth."

"I want to help," she all but whined.

"This isn't something you can help with. You've got to let me handle it." Just then, Kevin walked back into the room and took in the scene with understanding.

"Let Dean work, okay?" the Prophet said. "Or else he's going to get all grumpy. C'mon, I'll show where the showers and see if I can rustle up some extra shampoo." Rebecca allowed Kevin to lead her out of the room but tossed a glance over her shoulder. Dean was back at the bookshelves, running a hand over spines and murmuring to himself.

Kevin showed back up after about ten minutes and sat across from Dean who was seated at the table, flipping through a leatherbound journal.

"What's the deal?" he asked. Dean glanced up.

"You got her settled?"

"Yeah, she's taking a shower but I'm sure she'll be back out soon with more questions."

"I don't exactly have answers at this point," Dean said.

"What do you know? You were talking to Crowley, right?" Kevin smirked when Dean looked surprised. "Hey that guy held me prisoner for a long time; I can sense when he's around. What did he say?" Dean rubbed a hand over his eyes.

"There's some spat going down in Hell, someone's trying to take over."

"I thought Lucifer was still locked up."

"Not Lucifer. A demon named Beelzebub." Kevin's eyes widened at the name. "You know him?"

"I mean, not personally, but I've heard of him. The demon of all demons."

"Awesome."

"So what does that have to do with your family?" Dean shifted in his chair, waiting for Kevin to put it together. "Dean," he said slowly, a few moments later. "Are you saying that this Beelzebub dude has your family?"

"That's what Crowley seems to think." Kevin let out a rush of air, going limp against the back of his chair.

"This is seriously bad news."

"Tell me about it."

"Do you have a plan?"

"Working on it," Dean grunted, leaning back over his book. Kevin reached into the pile and pulled out one of his own, opening it over his knees, which were propped up on the table's edge. He read for about ten minutes before speaking again.

"Do you even know where to start looking?"

"No. I figure we have to try and summon him. Right?"

"I guess," Kevin said but the hesitation in his voice was obvious. "If you think that's a good idea."

"Not a good idea," Dean almost snapped. "But it's all I have." Why was everyone being so difficult? Didn't they get he was trying his best but literally had nothing to go on?

"Crowley said something about flies," he told Kevin. "That mean anything to you?" Kevin cocked his head and flapped his arms at his sides.

"Fly like a bird?" Dean rolled his eyes but shrugged.

"Or like an angel."

"So we think he was a fallen angel?" Dean shrugged again.

"Crowley said he was Lucifer's big brother so I'm assuming so."

"We should ask Cas." Kevin put the book on the table and twisted in his chair, craning his neck to find the angel. "Where is Cas by the way?"

"Took off." Kevin frowned. That didn't seem very Cas-like. Then again, Cas hadn't exactly been acting like Cas the last couple years. Dean was purposefully not meeting his eyes so Kevin assumed something had gone down between them while Crowley was around. That wasn't good. The Prophet knew they needed someone else on their side and the angel would have been a powerful ally at the very least.

"I'm sure he'll be back." Dean said nothing and the two of them returned to reading. Rebecca came out a half hour later and refused to look at Dean, going instead over to the bookshelves and plucking one from its perch. When she sat down next to Dean and put her feet up on the table, Dean glanced over and his expression darkened.

"What did I tell you?" She scowled and held up the book for him to inspect.

"Chill. It's a novel by Charles Dickens."

"What?" If possible, her frown got deeper.

"A normal book. Is it okay if I read some nineteenth century British literature?" she asked sarcastically. Dean blinked.

"Uh, yeah sure. I didn't know you liked that stuff." Her only response was to open the old book and start reading and Dean went back to his research. The three of them stayed there until the afternoon, each fidgeting and getting up to stretch their legs occasionally. At some point, Kevin took Rebecca to the kitchen to get lunch and brought a sandwich out to Dean who ignored it.

"You should eat," the Prophet said but turned away when Dean ignored him.

"Do you have anything fun to do here?" Rebecca asked after lunch. She'd gotten a good way through her book but it was hard for the normally active girl to just sit there. Right about this time she would be at swim practice after a long day at school. They had a meet next week and she shuddered to think what her coach would say if she didn't show up for it.

"Describe fun," Dean said, not taking his eyes off the book in front of him. It was his seventh one of scanning and there was nothing. All the high and mighty angel-demon stuff was about Lucifer. Nothing about an older brother. Maybe they were on the totally wrong track.

"I don't know. I'm just so bored. Can I have my phone back?"

"No."

"Kevin said there's like a bubble over this place so no one can track me." Dean finally looked up.

"I'm sorry, we just can't risk it. Until I know exactly what we're dealing with, we have to be extra careful. The young girl nodded and bit her lip, glancing away. She was trying really hard not to think about her mom and little sister locked with some evil men and for the most part, distracting herself had worked, but she could only go so long pretending nothing was wrong. This was not some random vacation. Her family was in danger.

"I'm going to my room," she announced and slid out of Dean's view. He stared after her for a minute and then went back to reading. Whatever problems Rebecca had, he could deal with them later. She wasn't going anywhere.

"She's upset, Dean," Kevin said a minute later.

"I know."

"Aren't you going to talk to her?"

"And tell her what? That I think there's a war going on in Hell and that the worst demon in the world kidnapped her family?"

"Well," Kevin said, eyebrows raised. "I wouldn't put it exactly like that." Dean snorted and buried his head back in the pages.

"Hey!" he said a minute later, standing abruptly. "I think I found something." Kevin hurried to the other side of the table and stared at the writing above Dean's finger. What he read wasn't encouraging.

"The original fallen angel? I thought that was Lucifer?"

"Guess not. I suppose that means he's the original demon. The first demon." Something inside Dean was terrified at that thought. The alpha demon. That was about as bad as it got. What was Dean supposed to do against something like that?

"So why did he fall?" Kevin wanted to know. There wasn't not much there – only a paragraph – but he could feel the excitement and hope coming off Dean in waves.

"It doesn't say. Maybe God cast him out like Lucifer. Wouldn't be the first time."

"He must have done some bad shit," Kevin said, sitting down again, feeling just as defeated as he had two minutes ago. Not Dean. He was practically bouncing around the bookshelves, looking for something that might connect him to this original demon. _The _original demon.

"I don't care what he did," Dean said, adding another book to the stack resting in one arm. "I want to know how to take him out."

"That's your plan? To kill him?" Dean stopped and stared at Kevin who was looking a different kind of incredulous.

"What else am I supposed to do?" Dean said, as if the thought to do anything else hadn't even crossed his mind. He hunted things. He killed things. It's just what he did. This wasn't any different. "We got Lucifer, didn't we?" Kevin shook his head at that statement.

"First of all, you didn't kill Lucifer. You locked him in a cellblock in Hell. And second of all, you had help on that one. A lot of help."

_Sam._

Because really, it hadn't been Dean who pushed Lucifer over the cliff. It was Sam. Dean had just been along for the ride while his little brother took the fall. Literally.

"Oh no," Kevin said, seeing something change inside the Hunter. His spine straightened and his shoulders grew broader if possible and when he looked up, there was something dangerous brewing in his eyes.

"If I have to kill myself to make them safe, I will," Dean said and when the words left his lips for the open air, he knew that he'd never said anything truer. "Kevin, maybe this is what I'm meant to do. No, don't look at me like that, I'm being serious. My parents are gone. My brother is gone. Look, I have no one left."

Kevin understood where Dean was coming from. He understood that Dean would always be a Hunter first, a man second. There would always be a part of him – a fucking large part of him – that wanted to put his life on the line every damn second of the day. Dean wasn't happy unless he was hurting. That's just the way it was and Kevin knew that. He didn't take offense. The man in front of him had been through so much in his life, it was amazing he had anything left to give at all, any blood left to bleed. So what he was doing was trying to get through the rest of his life the only way he knew how.

But just because Kevin understood didn't mean that the child standing in the doorway to the room did. Both men heard her small intake of breath at Dean's words, watched her face turn from shocked to hurt to furious. Dean realized his mistake too late.

"You're a jackass," she said, the words vibrating with anger. "You're such a _jackass._" She took a step back when Dean came toward her. "Don't even think about coming near me. Clearly, I'm nothing to you. You're probably not even really looking for them, are you?" When Dean opened his mouth to calm her down, she shook her head. "Don't even try, Dean. You can have your secrets but stop pretending you actually like me. I don't need any more bullshit in my life." She darted out of the room, leaving Dean and Kevin wide-eyed at the outburst.

"Does she – does she do that often?" Kevin asked. The only experience he had with teenage girls was from when he was a teenage boy and he didn't remember them being quite that vicious. Or having that kind of mouth on them.

But Dean didn't answer; he was busy swaying where he stood.

"Dean? You okay?"

"Yeah," he finally grunted. "I think Sam wants to talk." If that's what it meant when his head felt like it was soaked in kerosene and lit on fire.

"What?" Kevin didn't know about spirit-Sam yet and Dean was in no condition to tell him.

"I'll be back in a bit," Dean said before getting to his own room as fast as possible. He made it to the bed just before his knees buckled but this time he was expecting it and instead of trying to fight it, Dean opened the door to the pain, letting it carry him on a wave of unconsciousness far quicker than before.

Sam was waiting for him, standing at the window expectantly when Dean materialized across the room.

"You called?" Dean said hoarsely, stumbling his first step but getting his balance back within a few seconds.

"Uh, yeah," Sam said as if it were the obvious answer. "I've been waiting for you to tell me what's going on."

"Can't you just like, see it?" Dean said.

"How many times do I have to tell you that I'm just sitting here? Minding my own business. I can't see or hear anything."

"That has got to be so boring," Dean said, getting off track for a moment. "You would rather sit in my brain doing nothing than be up in Heaven and all it's glory and shit?"

"Just tell me what Crowley said," his brother answered, ignoring the question. Dean took a seat on one of the beds, facing his brother.

"There's a war going on in Hell. A demon named Beelzebub is trying to unseat Crowley from the throne." Sam started pacing, a habit he had carried from life to death, apparently. He always did it when he was thinking.

"Why does that name sound familiar?"

"Because you've probably heard it before. He's Lucifer's big brother." Sam stopped pacing for a moment to stare at Dean, just now noticing the fatigue lines creasing his older brother's face. While Sam would forever be age thirty-three – the age he died at – Dean was getting older. He could see it in his brother's expression, in his posture, even the way he spoke. There were a lot more than four years separating them now.

"He's the original demon, isn't he?" Sam said. "I read about him somewhere once."

"Of course you did," muttered Dean, thinking of all those hours he had just devoted to finding out something his brother already knew. "But yeah, he's bad news."

"So this demon – Beelzebub – what does he have to do with Liz and Kayleigh?" Unlike with Kevin, Dean didn't give Sam enough time to figure it out by himself.

"Beelzebub's demons have them. At least that's what Crowley said." Dean hesitated. "And I don't think he was lying."

"Now you're trusting Crowley?" Sam's voice was full of doubt and it made Dean angry.

"Not like I have a lot of choices here, Sam. I'm pretty much by myself on this one." It was almost the same thing he had said to Kevin and the same flicker of hurt crossed his brother's eyes. This time, Dean noticed. "You know what I mean." His brother was quiet for a moment and then said,

"And your next move is to do what? Track demonic omens?"

"'I'm looking for a way to summon him."

"You're doing _what_?" Dean didn't if it was because he hadn't seen Sam in five years and had forgotten what his brother was like or if it was some spirit thing but Sam's demeanor changed in a split second. His nostrils flared and he walked right up to Dean, leaning in until he was only a foot away from his brother. "Dean, that's suicide." Dean didn't deny it. "You aren't doing it."

"Yes I am."

"That is the worst possible plan in the world!" Sam cried, throwing his hands up in the air and almost smacking Dean in the process. The elder Winchester finally took a step back but Sam didn't seem to notice. "You aren't thinking clearly. We can come up with a new plan. A better plan."

"Yeah, Sammy?" Dean said sharply, using the nickname for the first time. "What would that be? Huh?"

"I don't know yet. Maybe you should give me more than thirty seconds to think about it," Sam snapped back. They each took a breath at the same time and then Sam turned away from Dean, running his hand through his hair as he thought it over.

"Did Crowley say _anything _else?" he asked. "Anything that might be useful."

"Yeah. Flies. That was it, that was his hint. One word. But we already figured out it means angel and we all know that Beelzebub was the original fallen angel so I don't think that's going -," he broke off as Sam spun his computer to face him and, leaning over the table, started typing furiously. "What are you doing?"

"Shut up for a second," Sam said and Dean was so taken aback at being ordered around that he actually kept quiet. But only for about a minute and then he was leaning over Sam's giant shoulder, trying to see around his brother. Sam was scrolling through a page on demonology and as far as Dean could tell, it didn't say anything they didn't already know. He tried again.

"Sam, I told you. He was – is – Lucifer's big brother and an angel that–"

"It doesn't mean angel," Sam interrupted. "That's not what Crowley meant."

"What are you talking about?"

"Here," Sam said, pointing to the screen and starting to read, "Beelzebub, the first fallen angel is thought to be one of the original demons and is represented in much folklore by a constant presence of flies."

_Represented in much folklore by a constant presence of flies._

The last word smacked into Dean with the weight of a sledgehammer. Not wings or angel flies. Flies like insects.

"You know _Lord of the Flies_?" Sam asked, enthusiasm spilling out of him. He was like an overexcited puppy latching onto a bone.

"No? Is that some kind of weird porn?" Sam stopped in his scrolling to give Dean an exasperated look and it was so familiar, such a playful gesture that Dean had seen a million times that his heart actually ached and a thrill ran down his spine because he was here, hunting with Sam. He tried to push the feeling down and away.

"No, it's a book. Didn't you have to read it in school? I read it in like three different grades…" His voice trailed off when all Dean did was raise an eyebrow.

"Sam if you think I read a single one of those dumb books-"

"Okay never mind," Sam said. "Good thing at least one of us did our homework. Anyway, _Lord of the Flies_ is a book about these kids who get deserted on an island and they start going insane and put this pig's head on a stick –,"

"Sam," Dean interrupted. "Spare me the English lecture and get to the point."

"Lord of the Fliesis a literal interpretation of the name Beelzebub."

"What does that mean for us?" Dean asked, moving away from the computer and sitting across from Sam. He wondered if the mini fridge in the corner held anything stronger than water. If Sam was any good at this spirit stuff, he could have conjured Dean up a nice big drink right about then.

"I don't know," Sam said, brows knitted in concentration as he kept reading. "If this guy is around, maybe flies could be an omen. Lord of the Flies right? So I bet they swarm around him when he's on Earth. That's what happened in the book at least."

"There's actually a book written about the original demon that they encourage kids to read?" Dean asked. "The public school system is more terrible than I thought."

"The pig's head on the stake represents Beelzebub and by the end of the book, it's all gross and has a cloud of flies around it."

"Great. So now we're going off a children's book."

"It's all we have so far." The collective 'we' slid out of Sam's mouth without him realizing it and Dean just looked at his brother – his dead brother – for a beat longer than necessary.

"I need to go back," Dean said. "Clue everyone in about all this stuff. Find out where Cas is." Just as Sam had grown nervous about Castiel's name before, his face took on a wary expression at the mention of the angel.

"Where's Cas?" he asked. Dean shrugged, standing and stretching, not noticing his brother's discomfort.

"Took off. He's being real bitchy lately. I don't know, man."

"Be careful," Sam said. "I don't think Cas is the same person you left behind." Dean bristled at the word choice.

"I didn't leave him behind. We agreed it was safer for both of us not to be in contact." Sam didn't say anything, just stared at Dean with wide eyes and when Dean went to continue, he found himself unable to speak and just then the floor rolled beneath him, tossing him to his knees, and he knew enough by now just to shut his eyes and wait for it all to be over.

xxx

Dean didn't have to search long for Castiel; the angel was waiting at the foot of Dean's bed when he woke up, rubbing at what seemed like an infinite headache. He wondered if it was ever going to go away or if he should just get used to the perpetual throbbing.

"Dean." The Hunter groaned and squinted at the figure of his once-now-maybe friend.

"Still doing the creepy staring thing while I'm asleep, Cas?" Dean said, clearing his throat of the hoarse words.

"You weren't sleeping."

"Nope," Dean said. "I don't seem to do that anymore." Cas narrowed his eyes as Dean bent to retie a shoelace.

"You should not be indulging your brother's spirit," the angel said. "It's not safe." Dean turned his head upwards, hands still fumbling with his laces.

"What do you know about it?"

"No more than you do other than it is not safe."

"Well," Dean said, standing up. "Right now Sam is the only one coming up with useful information. It's not like you've been very helpful." He brushed past the angel to head back to his books and Castiel followed, trailing too closely behind.

"I got you out of your house." Dean whirled around, his expression bordering on menacing.

"No. You took me out of my house against my will. You left my wife and child behind." Old Cas might have backed down, might have cocked his head to the side and reconsidered what he'd just said, but this Cas, Dean was learning, liked to argue and did not like to be wrong.

"There were demons coming to your house. I saved who I could at the time. Would you have preferred to be taken? You and your other child who is now safe?" Dean couldn't help thinking that if the demons had gotten him, gotten him and kept him alive, at least he would know whom he was dealing with. Instead, all he got was nondescript phone calls and clues that involved a children's story and insects.

"What do you know about Beelzebub?" Dean asked, not answering Castiel's question. This time, Cas blinked but then smoothed out his expression, which if Dean hadn't known Cas better, would have called frightened. But Cas didn't get frightened.

"Only that he's the most powerful demon there is."

"How can he be more powerful than Lucifer?" Dean demanded. "If we can lock up the Devil, surely we can lock up this guy. Sam called him the Lord of the Flies or something."

"Yes. He has many names and titles. That is one of them."

"And he was an angel?" Dean asked not waiting for Cas to answer his other question.

"Is."

"What? I thought you just called him a demon." Cas looked Dean dead in the eye and said,

"That's what makes him so dangerous. He's both."

* * *

**A/N: **Unfortunately guys, this is the last chapter for a while. It's more difficult than I thought it be trying to work on two major fics at once plus actually have a life so I'm gonna focus on How Far We've Come for the time being. **I am not abandoning this story**. I promise I will come back to it; I just want to give it the time it deserves and not half-ass things. So keep following and I'll keep you updated!


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